
N. BOOTH TARKINGTON, 1917 



BOOTH TARKINGTON 



BY 
ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY 




Illustrated 



Garden City New York 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1918 

C<rfu/f - 



n 






W 






Copyright, 1918, by 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

.including the Scandinavian 



MAR -2 1918 

V 

\ 
©C!.A492435 C 



TO 
B. T. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

Curiously enough, just about the time that Mr. 
Tarkington began to be of serious critical interest 
practitioners of literary criticism beyond the com- 
pass of a "review" of one book left off with him. 
Thus this little study is able to arrive at ultimate 
conclusions quite different from any estimate of Mr. 
Tarkington that I have ever seen in print. I have, 
however, in the course of my thought drawn very 
liberally upon a number of "sources." Where I 
have been in accord with the opinion of writers of 
earlier, much briefer, studies, I have not hesitated 
to adapt their ideas to my purpose. I am beholden 
in particular, for information, suggestions, and 
stimulation, to the following excellent books and 
articles: 

"Some American Story Tellers," by Frederick 
Taber Cooper; "The Advance of the English Novel," 
by William Lyon Phelps; "Representative American 
Story Tellers: Booth Tarkington," by Arthur Bart- 
lett Maurice, in the Bookman, February, 1907; 
"The Hoosiers," by Meredith Nicholson; "John-a- 
Dreams," Personal and Critical Sketch, Pearson's 
Magazine, March, 1903; "The Development of the 
English Novel" (though it has nothing about Mr. 
Tarkington in it), by Wilbur Cross; the little maga- 

vii 



viii Booth Tarkington 

zine John~a-Dreams; an article by C. H. Garrett in 
the Outlook, 72:817; and personal sketches in Cur- 
rent Literature, 30:280; Critic, 36:399; Harper's 
Weekly, 46:1773. 

For the record of my first view of Mr. Tarkington 
I have, by the courtesy of the Indianapolis Star, 
drawn upon an article of mine, "Impression of 
Literary Celebrities Gathered by a Returned Na- 
tive," which appeared in that newspaper. The little 
story about Mr. Tarkington and the professor was 
one time contributed to the New York Evening Post. 

R. C. H. 

New York, December 15, 1917. 



FOREWORD 

What a joke it is now, that gay old affair, which 
was all about a few years ago, the gift book, stuffed 
full of straw and bound in tinsel. Happily it is as 
dead to-day as the horsehair sofa, the wax flowers 
of the old mantle, and bisque statuary. And its 
place has been taken by something not unworthy of 
the name of book. 

It would be, as they say in England, li a jolly good 
job, too," if all our flood of "blurb" tales about liv- 
ing authors, as florid and as empty as the gift book, 
could go the way of that quaint memory. In other 
countries, indeed, there is nothing new about the idea 
of considering a literary figure of the day with an 
effort at honesty and intelligence. In England it 
seems to be quite the fashion to get up all the while 
very respectable little biographical and critical affairs 
about Mr. Wells and Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Shaw and 
Mr. Galsworthy. And we do have knocking about 
over here admirable little books about foreign writers 
such as Conrad, Anatole France, and the one-time 
American Mr. James. But certainly we have rather 
neglected to pry into living home talent. 

ix 



x Foreword 

Nothing, however, is now as it was. Everyone 
wants to know more about the value of what one is 
doing than one did before the war. And decided 
indeed has been the effect of this general quickened 
mental alertness upon reading. Books are more 
carefully chosen; much more is demanded of them. 

And that is the excuse for this somewhat novel 
proceeding: a little book (which, with all its multi- 
plicity of failings, fears bunkum like the devil) about 
a gentleman who certainly must be held a thor- 
oughly characteristic American writer. Mr. Tark- 
ington, as one of our most popular novelists, should 
be a thoroughly legitimate object of attack. Has 
he got any justification for being around these days 
and for going on? Are you making a decent use of 
your time in reading him? Ought all his early books 
to be scrapped? And how, exactly, did he come about, 
anyhow? 

There is, 1 think, more or less to be said about 
that. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

N. Booth Tarkington, 1917 Frontispiece 

Mr. Tarkington's Study at Kennebunkport, 

Maine Facing Page 198 



BOOTH TARKINGTON 



IN contemplating the idea of Mr. Tarkington 
one is struck at the outset by an arresting 
reflection. It is impossible to avoid the as- 
sumption that, whether or not he has "made* good," 
the gods had something decidedly unusual in mind 
in the matter of his existence. 

Anyone who has considered, ever so lightly, the 
springs of English literature has been amazed by 
the frequency of the presence, well-nigh inevitable 
in the background, of the minister who was father, 
or at least grandfather, to the writer. It would 
seem that whenever Nature had a man of letters 
up her sleeve the first gift with which she has felt 
it necessary to dower him has been a preacher sire. 
It has also, everybody knows, been the rule that 
men of brilliant minds have had mothers of intel- 
lectual tastes — though sometimes the fathers seem 
to have been negligible. Further, there is something 
fascinating to the inquiring mind, and doubtless of 
psychological significance, in the fact of so many 
celebrated writers having at first mistakenly felt 
their vocation to be that of the "artist," as the term 
is popularly understood. Hazlitt, for instance, and 
George Moore, and the author of The Way of All 

3 



4 Booth Tarhington 

Flesh, and a lot more, all went at the world in the 
belief that they were called to interpret it in the 
medium of paint. The most illustrious instance of 
the frustrated ambition to be an illustrator of other 
men's books is, of course, Thackeray. But there is 
almost no end to the cases in which a desire to draw 
is found to have been lurking in an author's past. 
Robert W. Chambers first intended to be an illus- 
trator. O. Henry had an itch for making pictures 
before he found himself. And the spirited illustra- 
tions Gilbert Chesterton has made for the books of 
his friend Mr. Belloc leave no doubt that he would 
have been as much of an enfant terrible as an illus- 
trator as he is a journalist. 

So, it surely was "up to" Mr. Tarkington to (as 
the title of a British painting of some years ago 
which I recall has it) "for God's sake do something 
or be something!" If, on the strength of having 
been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had 
"lain down" altogether he certainly would have 
flouted a singular beneficence of the fates. All the 
auspicious morning stars sang together at his birth. 
His paternal grandfather was a pioneer minister of 
Indiana; one of his grandmothers wrote poetry; his 
mother was distinguished in the community of her 
residence for her intellectual character, and or- 
ganized the first woman's club in a locality where 
there are now perhaps more women's clubs in pro- 



Booth Tarkington 5 

portion to population than in any other place in 
the world; he early was inwardly impelled to make 
pictures; and he was born in a spectacular "literary 
center" of the United States quite at the right 
moment to be in at the hour of its bursting into 
literary flower. 

While it is undoubtedly true that we know very 
little about a talent till we know where it grew up, 
the general facts of Mr. Tarkington's "growing up" 
have already been so fairly well disseminated that 
to retell them here would, maybe, have the sound 
of "old stuff." Amid all our wealth of authors, few, 
if any, have provoked a more popular interest — a 
public interest peculiarly touched with a spirit of 
personal attachment — than the author of Monsieur 
Beaucaire and The Gentleman from Indiana. And 
the likeness of Mr. Tarkington's features, it may 
be said offhand, is probably as widely and as in- 
stantly recognized as that of George Washington or 
Colonel Roosevelt. Much water has flowed under 
the mill, however, since the newspapers and maga- 
zines vied with one another in heralding this "young 
writer," in news articles and personal sketches, as 
"an American of to-morrow." Mr. Tarkington has 
become, like the Statue of Liberty, an established 
fact among us, whose origin is now discussed only 
by foreigners. And, glancing back, there may be 
several new things to be said, and some things to 



6 Booth Tarkington 

be said to our purpose here about what has been 
said, and perhaps forgotten. 

Mr. Tarkington was born in Indianapolis in 1869. 
He is a descendant of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, 
a noted scholar and orator of Revolutionary fame; 
his great-grandmother was Mary Newton, who fig- 
ures as a beauty in the Annals of Old Salem. Mary 
Newton made a runaway match with a soldier of 
the Revolution, Walter Booth. It is not true, as 
has somewhere been said (though one feels that by 
rights it should have been so), that from these were 
descended the Booths who were the pride and glory 
of the American stage forty odd years ago. Another 
family altogether, that. Mary Newton's Walter 
Booth was not an actor, nor were any of his de- 
scendants of the "profession"; though the instinct 
of the actor, the mimic, one gathers from Mr. Tark- 
ington, did repeatedly crop out in the blood of the 
Tarkington Booths. Mr. Tarkington 's family have 
been prominent in Indiana for three generations 
He was named for his uncle Newton Booth, a native 
of Salem, Indiana, — the birthplace also of the au- 
thor, diplomat, and cabinet officer, John Hay, — one 
time governor of California, senator from that State, 
prominent as an orator throughout his public career. 
In attempting to explain some of Mr. Tarkington's 
temperamental predilections, a purely imaginary 
Gallic strain in his ancestry has been invented, on 



Booth Tarkington 7 

his father's side of the house. His father, John 
Stevenson Tarkington, an Indiana lawyer andjsoldier 
of the Civil War, distinguished among his associates 
as a gentleman of the old school, and familiarly 
known as "Judge" Tarkington, partook in his prime 
of the meat and drink of all authentic Indianians, 
politics, and sat for a time in the State legislature; 
the leisure of his later years he has employed in 
literary work, and is the author of two books. His 
Hermit of Capri, published in 1910, reveals a pleas- 
ant fanciful vein that is quaintly individual. All 
of the novelist's family for several generations have 
had a bookman quality, though Mr. Tarkington^ 
jealous of their good name, is very quick to insist 
that they have never been "offensively" book peo- 
ple. "At least," he says, "I don't think so." 

Booth Tarkington himself, by all accounts, was 
very precocious up to about the age of four. He 
further fixed himself very beautifully in every tra- 
dition of persons destined to literary fame by being 
a "queer child." His oddities, one gathers, were 
even more odd than is usual with odd children. 
For one thing, he had a "Hunchberg family." Just 
so! Exactly such a "circle of friends," his "In- 
visibles," as that possessed by Hamilton Swift, 
Junior, queer "little father of dream children," 
celebrated, some thirty-five years later, in Beasley y s 
Christmas Party. Whether "Mister" Tarkington 



8 Booth Tarkington 

had also a Siinpledoria and a Bill Hammersley, I 
cannot say; but I think it highly probable. In- 
deed, I understand, there was just such a glorious 
make-believe party given for him as that staged by 
the Honorable David Beasley for his dismayingly 
active-minded little charge, "Mister Swift." 

After about four, Mr. Tarkington says, he was 
"not precocious at all"; and he was, he affirms, 
"slow" at school; which condition in early educa- 
tion, by the way, is yet another peculiarity not in- 
frequently remarked in children who later develop 
conspicuous mental powers. Mr. Tarkington be- 
comes even preposterous in the lengths to which he 
went (unwittingly no doubt) to oblige the require- 
ments, both sentimental and scientific, for every 
early symptom of latent genius. In his childhood 
he even suffered certain nervous disorders, "nearly 
St. Vitus" attacks; which have in some cases, ac- 
cording to learned men, borne a relation to the 
activities of brilliant minds. It is pleasanter, how- 
ever, to turn from this rather recondite point to 
note an event, held in store by the beneficent des- 
tiny which selected his birthplace, which undoubt- 
edly did much to set the tune of his mind. That 
was the beginning of his association with a figure 
about whom most of us can never hear too much, 
though this gentleman was not quite so much of a 
universal figure at that time. Mr. Tarkington began 



Booth Tarkington 9 

his friendship with Riley, a neighbor, when he was 
about eleven years old; and he acknowledges (shak- 
ing his head in reflection at the depth of it) that 
the spirit of Riley has exercised over him a strong, 
if often unconsciously felt, influence all his life. 

If (as Mr. James declares) the first fact which 
goes a great way to explain the composition of 
Stevenson is that the boyhood of the author of 
Kidnapped was passed in the shadow of Edinburgh 
Castle, it is equally true that it would halt terribly 
at the start any account of the work of Mr. Tark- 
ington which should omit to insist promptly that 
he grew up in the neighborly and cozy big country 
town (as it was then) of Indianapolis. Even now, 
"the man across the street or next door," says Mr. 
Nicholson in his essay "A Provincial Capital" "will 
share any good thing he has with you, whether it be 
a cure for rheumatism, a new book, or the garden 
hose." And, "it is a town where doing as one likes 
is not a mere possibility, but an inherent right." 

Much of the local color of Mr. Tarkington's boy- 
hood in the middle-western town which was his 
home is of course reflected in the boy stories of his 
middle life. The topography of his youthful orbit, 
one perceives, comprised as its most salient features 
"alleys," stables, yards, fences, "cisterns," and 
porches, with more or less perfunctory rounds to 
Sunday School, dancing class, and "Ward School, 



10 Booth Tarkington 

Nomber Seventh." He was a town boy; neither a 
city, nor a country, boy. The pleasant flavor of a 
thoroughly representative American town, which he 
imbibed in his early formative years, permeates 
nearly all his work; and it is his very honest feeling 
for the charm of just such a place that, one cannot 
fail to note, gives a strength to much of his rosy 
sentiment, — and, later, driving force to his satire. 
The precocious eccentricities of Mr. Tarkington's 
tenderest years did not interfere with his being a 
remarkably boy-like boy when the time came for 
that, so one gathers from his intimate knowledge 
of the hair-raising inner workings of the minds of 
Messrs. Penrod Schofield, Samuel Williams, and the 
rest of that now illustrious "limited bachelor set." 
In fact, the exuberance of spirits, spontaneity, and 
infectious joy of life which Mr. Tarkington ex- 
hibited in his 'teens linger among the traditions of 
the neighborhood of his boyhood. A tradition sub- 
stantiated by Mr. Tarkington's confession that the 
Penrod stories cost him no effort, and involve no 
contemporary observation of boys — though boys, he 
says, are pretty near the most interesting things 
there are. The Penrod stories, in short, one feels 
may be taken to represent Mr. Tarkington's way of 
writing what Mr. James, in his title of an account 
of a very different boy, called A Small Boy and 
Others. Mr. James is more than discreet in this 



Booth Tarkington 11 

volume; lie is reticence itself. Mr. Tarkington 's 
every book is the soul of candor. 

Seventeen, as the reviewers have noted, may be 
read as "a clever caricature, a 'rattling good story/ 
a 'gay analysis of calf-love,' a serious study in ado- 
lescent psychology, or a remarkable picture of small- 
town American life," that is, a truthful transcript of 
juvenile manners at the time of, so to put it, the 
author's "first-dress-suit period." Penrod was a 
novelist, and William Baxter a poet. And not only 
Mr. Tarkington's vivid presentation of their dis- 
similar inspirations, but the character of their lit- 
erary productions, proclaims beyond doubt the 
autobiographic touch. In his abortive fragments 
of fiction, Penrod is a much better novelist (albeit 
a bit blood curdling) than "William Sylvanus Bax- 
ter, Esq." (as he signs himself), is a poet. And so, 
indeed, is the creator of both these writers. In 
fact, there is something decidedly prophetic about 
the turn of the embryonic talent of the youthful 
author of Harold Ramorez, with its unforgettable 
passages such as this: 

The remainin scondrel had an ax which he came 
near our heros head with but missed him and remand 
stuck in the wall. Our heros amumition was ex- 
haused what was he to do, the remanin scondrel 
would soon get his ax lose so our hero sprung for- 
ward and bit him till his teeth met in the flech for 



12 Booth Tarkington 

now our hero was fighting for his very life. At this 
the remanin scondrel also cursed and swore vile 
oaths. 



For (one fancies) was not the boy author of 
Harold Ramorez father to a man also strongly drawn 
to depicting scenes of darkly romantic drama, and 
one who came to paint with gusto, and much 
ability, scenes of carnage? For one instance, the 
grim automobile accident, an uncommonly impres- 
sive bit of pictorial writing, in The Guest of 
Quesney. 

Mr. Baxter's poems were of lovely ladies. And 
so were (those preserved to us in an early magazine) 
Mr. Tarkington's. Mr. Baxter excelled in sincerity 
when he wrote: 

Milady 

I do not know her name 

Though it would be the same 

Where roses bloom at twilight 

And the lark takes his flight 

It would be the same anywhere 

Where music sounds in air 

I was never introduced to the lady 

So I could not call her Lass or Sadie 

So I will call her Milady 

By the sands of the sea 

She always will be - 

Just Milady to me. 






Booth Tarkington 13 

Mr. Tarkington, having the advantage of a uni- 
versity education, excelled merely in artistry, when, 
sometime in 1896, he wrote: 

The Proud Lover 

Nay, never wave your fan at ME 

To come, and kneel, and tie your shoe — 
I'll stiffly seem most slow to see; 

Or, if I turn, will gaze at you 
With coldness. High and haughtily 

I hold me, ma'am; I was not made 
To bend me in servility; 

I'll bend — sometimes — to kiss your brow, 

But never low as shoe-lace bow! 
— What ails the minx? — she's coming here, 

I will reprove her insolence; 
My troth she has — but ne'er De Vere 

Brooked any such impertinence! 

The other's loose, as well, you say? 
— 'T is tied. That's all, my love, to-day? 

The sentiment, in both poems, is the same. 






n 



MR. TARKINGTON took to "college" as 
a duck to water. He took a spin at 
Phillips Exeter Academy to "prepare" 
for what was with him indeed a "college career." 
Mr. Tarkington's going to college may be fancifully 
compared in effect to Conrad's marriage with the sea. 
At Exeter Academy he began to open into flower. 
His pranks and exploits there (I have heard) are 
still recalled as among the brightest spots in the 
recollection of the distant youth of his classmates. 
And there the orator and writer in his blood began 
to "break out on him." He attracted besides some 
attention as the illustrator of the class yearbook. 
He went next to Purdue University, at Lafayette, 
Indiana, a sister institution to the Indiana State 
University; and here doubtless he got rubbed in 
another layer of the native Hoosier soil, which was 
later to be of such value in determining the temper 
of his work. Though "Purdue" is the State school 
of technology, it is not diligent in the sciences to the 
neglect of the arts. And Mr. Nicholson, in his little 
history, The Hoosiers, speaks of Lafayette as "one 
of the most attractive of Indiana cities, fortunate in 
its natural setting and in the friendliness of its 
people to all good endeavors." 

14 






Booth Tarkington 15 

An article signed "N. Booth Tarkington '93," 
which appeared in an old number of The Nassau 
Literary Magazine, begins: "Fifteen persons, who 
had once defined themselves simply — and completely 
— as Yale men, and one person for whose answers to 
inquiries about himself the word 'Princeton' (spoken 
in a tone of reserve) had sufficed, sat in the office 
room of the University Club." "Princeton man" 
(one may say) defined Mr. Tarkington, not simply, 
but eloquently, joyously, and completely, in (as 
the well-worn poetic phrase has it) the bloom of his 
young manhood. Probably nobody ever had a 
college career which has been so widely relished, so 
much celebrated and sung, as that of Mr. Tark- 
ington's. And probably nobody can quite under- 
stand Mr. Tarkington's success as a novelist, or, 
altogether, his books themselves, without turning 
back for a peep at the gay spectacle of his Princeton 
days. He studied to some extent, no doubt, as, it is 
recorded, he stood well in his class, according to the 
curriculum. But that, one suspects, was merely an 
incident, resulting from the natural quickness of his 
mind. He is reported to have said that he has no 
doubt that he imbibed some education at Princeton; 
"though it seems to me that I tried to avoid that as 
much as possible." 

A writer whose authority is evident in his signing 
himself "John-a-Dreams" (the name of an inti- 



16 Booth Tarkington 

mate magazine of a little clique with which Mr. 
Tarkington was associated directly after leaving col- 
lege), writing in a magazine "appreciation" some- 
time after Mr. Tarkington "sprang" into national 
popularity, testifies that the college Tarkington was 
never a plodder. This writer, in Pearson's Magazine, 
says: "In fact, to see him walking across the campus 
with his sweater turned up about his neck and his 
hands thrust deep in his trousers' pockets, or to 
catch a glimpse of him hurrying nervously along in 
evening clothes, would readily give the impression 
that he never worked at all." And of this college 
"man," the writer adds that perhaps he felt in- 
tuitively that he did give this impression, for shortly 
after his first literary "success," in naive seriousness, 
he explained to a classmate that he "really did a lot 
of hard work on the thing." 

It is highly probable that Mr. Tarkington would 
have made a mess of it if routine labor had, unhap- 
pily, been his portion. I know a man who suffered 
a nervous breakdown from an office job of literary 
hack work to whom Mr. Tarkington said, "I couldn't 
have done it." He is of the highly-strung type, the 
fine temperament, capable of soaring flights (and in 
later years of demoniac energy), for whom the sus- 
tained effort commonly called work is made possible 
only by intense interest and enthusiasm in what it 
undertakes. Drudgery would probably have broken 






Booth Tarkington 17 



him; poverty have blighted him altogether. He is 
not of the stamp of those who have made two and 
two come five; who have toiled at hard labor, mean- 
ingless to them, in an engine room or at a desk, or 
have tended bar (as literary men have done), for eight 
to ten hours a day, and have welded literature in a 
long day of their own wrung from hours allotted by 
nature to sleep. One cannot make such a hero of this 
Harry Fielding. He was made for the sun; and the 
sun, nothing backward in its duty here, shone on him. 
Professor Phelps, in his volume The Advance of 
the English Novel, has seen in Bibbs of The Turmoil 
a resemblance to the author. Professor Phelps' 
vision (it strikes one) is a peculiar one for anyone 
to have who has ever looked upon Mr. Tarkington. 
Though, at the most, this much is undoubtedly true: 
compulsory employment in a machine shop would 
probably have had about the same effect on Mr. 
Tarkington that it had on Bibbs. The graceful and 
unconscious ease of Mr. Tarkington's attitude to- 
ward life in his Princeton years was so irresistible 
that his classmates had their joke upon it, and ap- 
plied to him the words of a popular Glee Club song 
he used to sing: 

I've been working on the railroad, 

All the livelong day; 
I've been working on the railroad, 

To pass the time away. 



18 Booth Tarkingion 

The undergraduate Mr. Tarkington had a kind of 
genius for American college life: he was, apparently, 
in everything and of everything that made for good 
fellowship. Such, it seems, were the qualities of his 
heart and mind made manifest there that he has 
become one of the bright legends of Princeton. His 
popularity there, both as an undergraduate and to 
this day, is notorious. Jesse Lynch Williams, and 
divers and sundry others of his classmates, have 
graved the eulogy again and again. No doubt he 
can never live it down: he was one of the young 
lions of his day, and as such has passed into a 
proverb. 



Speak they, say they, tell they the Tale: 

Mr. Tarkington entered his class at Princeton at 
the beginning of his junior year. During this year 
The Tiger (the college comic weekly) was revived; 
some say Mr. Tarkington revived it; at any rate, 
he was soon numbered among its editors, and his 
contributions, in text and pictures, to it for a long 
period probably were of considerable aid in giving it 
the important place it holds in college journalism. 
In collaboration with a fellow student Mr. Tark- 
ington wrote an opera, which he staged and di- 
rected, taking at the same time an important part in 
the cast, — and as an actor was also very "popular." 
The play met with such response that it was given 






Booth Tarkington 19 

for three successive years. This genie of college life 
ate and smoked and gossiped with the Ivy Club; 
he (though Mr. Tarkington has never been per- 
sonally active in outdoor games) sympathized with 
and loyally supported the athletic teams (and still 
usually gets to Princeton in the autumn at football 
time); he wrote the prize class song, and sang and 
travelled with the Glee Club, in which he was 
soloist, and for which he wrote many, or most, of 
its songs. Poe's Raven was one of the pieces that he 
set to music. 

The "quiet playfulness" which "pervaded" (as 
Penrod says), "our hero," the Princeton "star"; 
his "delicious, unconscious drollery"; his "mobile, 
serio-comic facial expressions"; his wit, "ever bril- 
liant, never boisterous " ; his "saving sense of humor," 
which enabled him to appreciate keenly a joke on 
himself; these are things which have always been 
fondly emphasized by his college mates in their 
published "personal sketches." And this great 
"card" (in Mr. Bennett's term) was, by all ac- 
counts whatever, also a Sensitive Plant. He took, 
one hears, all the hubbub he stirred up, with the 
utmost good humor; and his shyness is as prover- 
bial as his "greatness," — and, naturally, must have 
had a good deal to do with it, as nothing (they say) 
is more captivating in a popular idol than a dash of 
the "modestv of the school-girl." There is, of 



£0 Booth Tarkington 

course, the classic tribute to this young lion's doe- 
like nature. One of the little world of men who en- 
joyed him first has expressed his sentiment about 
him in some verses which hang on the walls of the 
Princeton Club of New York, beside an original 
sketch of an interesting-looking gentleman in eve- 
ning clothes, who suggests James J. Corbett, but who 
is intended to represent Mr. Tarkington singing 
"Danny Deever." The verses, doubtless, you 
know: 

Rondel 

The same old Tark— just watch him shy 
Like hunted thing, and hide, if let, 
Away behind his cigarette, 

When "Danny Deever!" is the cry. 

Keep up the call and by and by 
We'll make him sing, and find he's yet 
The same old Tark. 

No "Author Leonid" we spy 

In him, no cultured ladies' pet: 

He just drops in, and so we get 
The good old song, and gently guy 
The same old Tark — just watch him shy! 

In his circle Mr. Tarkington's singing of Kipling's 
ballad, "The Hanging of Danny Deever," seems to 
have been a whole lot like Edward FitzGerald's 



Booth Tarhington 21 

translation of the Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam. He 
sort of made the thing. He was apparently called 
upon to sing it upon every available occasion. The 
student of the life and "good times" of Mr. Tark- 
ington is given, by Mr. "John-a-Dreams," a fra- 
grant picture of young hearts: After dinner, in fine 
weather, before the steps of Old North College, 
where it is the privilege of the seniors to discourse 
college songs, Mr. Tarkington was, when he showed 
himself (it is told), invariably compelled to give his 
great hit. 

There was no escape for him from the vociferous 
demand, except to slink away under cover of the 
gathering dusk; which he frequently did, from a 
feeling that too much prominence was being given 
to his performance as distinct from the general 
character of the singing. Though at first he would 
sit and plead with his companions to "go on and 
sing something else"; but latterly, realizing the fu- 
tility of any appeal, he resorted to bodily escape 
as soon as the cry of "Tark! Tark! Danny Deever!" 
was raised. 

And the same cry continued to be raised long 
after Mr. Tarkington's senior year wherever he 
joined himself to a quorum of his college mates; 
who called, exactly as they did years before, for 
exactly the same performance by which they meas- 
ured his popularity then; and he yielded with the 
same nervous embarrassment as when he was first 
made to sing it. 



22 Booth Tarkington 

This matter has here been belabored at such a 
great rate quite in the interest of literary criticism: 
in order to make clear that all his life Mr. Tarking- 
ton has been a "great hand" at the singing. Just the 
other day, in an Indianapolis paper it was reported 
that, under an indoor bower of greenery and in 
company with a number of others in fancy dress, he 
sang at an entertainment given for the "benefit" of 
something or other. It is not improbable that he is 
singing somewhere to-night. 

A most conspicuous effect of the atmosphere of 
his college life which Mr. Tarkington, with amusing 
unconsciousness of it, has carried over into his work 
is the spirit of the Glee Club, an ever recurrent echo 
of the sound of singing. With amusing unconscious- 
ness of it, as, when it was mentioned to him that he 
had an extraordinary amount of singing in his books, 
he first looked startled, and then collapsed as though 
in relish of a joke on himself. 

A gentleman of the name of Lord Gomme one- 
time wrote a learned paper on the subject of the 
songs men have been wont to sing at their labors. 
And Mr. Belloc, in a characteristic and charming 
essay, has lamented the fact that Englishmen no 
longer sing at their rows. It would be hard indeed, 
I think, to find a novelist in whose works there is so 
much singing as in the stories of Mr. Tarkington; 
and a study of the songs of Mr. Tarkington ought 



Booth Tarlrington 23 

to make a pleasant paper to be read at a literary 
club. 

Mr. Tarkington's lovers sing; and, of all lovers, all 
the world must love most a singing lover. Through- 
out his pages "serenaders nightly seek the garden with 
instrumental plunkings." Or, there is wafted to the 
ear of the rapt one without the music of a clear, soft 
voice within welling the "Angels' Serenade." His 
drunken men sing, — and that is about the most 
winning thing a drunken man can do. His Sunday- 
school classes sing; sometimes, as in The Flirt, the 
little voices raised in: 

Prashus joowuls, sweet joowuls, thee jams of iz 
crowowun, 

sing with rousing effect on the neighbors. Those of 
his characters who would mock sing, as Cora Madi- 
son sang of Lolita's kiss, to the horror of Hedrick. 
His mobs march singing "John Brown's Body." 
Even his dead men awake and sing, — did not Tom 
Meredith bending over the mangled body of the 
supposed Teller hear, "like the sound of some far, 
halting minstrelsy " : 

Wave willows — murmur waters— golden sunbeams 

smile, 
Earthly music — cannot waken — lovely — Annie 

Lisle? 



24 Booth Tarkington 

His small boys sing and whistle with equal eloquence. 
And, best of all, his colored people everywhere sing 
as only colored people can. "When the daylight 
was all gone, and the stars had crept out" (in The 
Gentleman from Indiana), "strolling negroes pa- 
trolled the sidewalks, thrumming mandolins and 
guitars, and others came and went, singing, making 
the night Venetian." 

The effect of this atmosphere of singing in Mr. 
Tarkington's books is several fold. It has a part 
in the success with which the author carries across 
the pages of his romances the glamorous spirit of 
chivalry. It aids greatly in giving to many of his 
books the infectious air which they have of youth 
and the "good old summer time"; people do not 
perhaps sing so much in winter — though it was a 
cold night (without) when Mr. O'Donnell at the 
King George Inn (in Cherry) led the chorus to his 
favorite song of the road, "The Old Bold Boy." 
Mr. Tarkington's portraits of humorous natures — 
darkies and boys — are rendered much more rounded 
and complete, than they would otherwise be, by his 
presentation of their frequent vocal flights. And, 
too, in his realistic pictures, the happiness, which he 
interprets, dwelling in small places — places of shaded 
streets and quiet evenings — is in no inconsiderable 
degree conveyed by the sounds of music flung to the 
air. People probably are not so much inclined to 



Booth Tarkington 25 

sing in great, crushing cities: it will be noted with 
interest that there is little or no singing in The 
Turmoil; only by the "great Thane," who, in his 
baronial glory, insists on roaring half-remembered 
fragments of "Nancy Lee" and bellowing the tune 
of "Larboard Watch." No, Bibbs sings his Wild 
Mustang song. 

Sometimes, too, in his romantic moments, it will 
be noticed that Mr. Tarkington's musical offerings 
tend to produce a somewhat theatrical effect; there 
is something stagey about their presentation; and 
the lifted voices or the distant violins appear to be 
in the wings, before the characters come "on." 
Though where the whole piece has an artificial 
atmosphere, as in the case of The Two Vanrevels, 
this effect is of course not inconsistent, is, indeed, a 
skillful touch. Music fairly saturates the romantic 
air of The Ttvo Vanrevels. Young gentlemen of the 
"Engine Company" put out warehouse fires sing- 
ing the while, "Oh the noble Duke of York." The 
adorable giddiness of the adorable Mrs. Tanberry is 
greatly enhanced by her trilling, "Methought I 
Met a Damsel Fair." And Corporal Crailey Gray 
dies joyfully to the sound of the band's playing his 
favorite air of "Rosin the Bow." You observe, too, 
that when you dance in Mr. Tarkington's pages (and 
you dance there a good deal), you frequently dance to 
music the words of which are fully printed out for you. 



26 Booth Tarkington 

The snatches of song which his characters sing, 
however, are not merely printed out on the story's 
page. These people really do sing! You can hear 
them as plain as anything. You remember that 
invalids murmured pitifully, and people trying to 
think cursed the day that they were born, when 
Penrod went by shrilling: 

One evuning I was sturow-ling 

Midst the city of the Dead, 
I viewed where all a-round me 

Their peace-full graves was SPREAD. 
But that which touched me mostlay 

Don't you hear that? 

The acoustic properties of the songs in Mr. Tark- 
ington's pages apparently reside in the sureness with 
which he seizes upon and the relish with which he 
stresses idiosyncrasies of pronunciation. His songs, 
and his dialect, are given with the energy of a kind 
of impish mimicry. The business upon which we 
are engaged in this essay, the effort to (in Mr. 
James' happy phrase) "catch a talent in the fact," 
to follow its line, and put a finger upon its essence, 
requires us to, so to put it, "take the finger prints" of 
the actor as well as of the singer in Mr. Tarkington. 
The mimic, the actor, is everywhere apparent in his 
work. He has had, from the first (as we've seen), 
considerable experience of the stage; he has chosen 



Booth Tarhington 27 

many of his closest friends from among actors; and 
references by the way throughout his books to the 
psychology and the point of view of the actor are 
frequent: Senator Rawson, in the story "Mrs. 
Protheroe," offered, on the evening of the Gov- 
ernor's Reception, an impression so haggard and 
worn that "an actor might have studied him for a 
make-up as a young statesman going into a de- 
cline." And Mr. Tarkington has a book to come 
(I've heard) which is largely a frolicking study of the 
actor's temperament. Also, in his personal appear- 
ance at about the time of the publication of The 
Gentleman from Indiana he was said to bear a 
striking resemblance to Edwin Booth's youthful 
pictures, — though I have seen one early photograph 
of about that time in which he presents (in a Noah's- 
ark-figure coat) decidedly the effect of a young, pro- 
vincial, Methodist preacher. Perhaps it was the 
coat. 



Ill 

AT the end of Mr. Tarkington's junior year 
he was chosen as one of the editors of the 
Nassau Literary Magazine. His contribu- 
tions to college periodicals may be described as in 
general "genteel" fragments. During his senior year 
he was active in forming the Coffee House Club, 
composed of some half-dozen members who met "to 
study literature." Just what was the nature of the 
literature studied I have not the means at hand to 
say; but there is internal evidence in Mr. Tarking- 
ton's literary productions now extant, of that period 
and the period immediately following, which strongly 
suggests that it was literature with a Coffee House 
capital C. Mr. Tarkington's pronounced early taste 
for a delicate flavor of the antique is fairly indicated 
in that one of his fledgling productions which has 
had the widest aftermath currency. This, a contri- 
bution in 1896 to the magazine John-a-Dreams, is: 

A Letter of Regrets 

(Left at Gilef's Coffee-Houfe; to 
be Given by y e Waiter to M r . 
Richard Rakell, Sir Thomas Wild- 
ing, or Lord Townbrake.) 

28 



Booth Tarkington 29 

And its first stanza runs: 

Dear Rick, Sir Tom, & Will: I write 

To fay I cannot come 
To join you in y e toasts to-night; — 

I 'tend My Lady's Drum. 

Rakell, Wilding, and Townbrake, one is charmed 
to greet as gentlemen, or at least as gentlemen hav- 
ing the names of gentlemen, who were cronies of 
his Grace of Winterset, rival of Monsieur Beaucaire 
for the heart of the Beauty of Bath, Lady Mary 
Carlisle. From the first, one notes, Mr. Tarkington 
has displayed a nice instinct for names for his peo- 
ple. His names never carry the slightest suggestion 
of the crude device of the tag: he never calls a fat 
man Mr. Paunch, or a miser Mr. Skinflint; yet in 
some subtle, happy way his names invariably do 
"go with" the characters of the persons that bear 
them, just as Mr. Pickwick is a good name for Mr. 
Pickwick, Tom Sawyer a good name for Tom Saw- 
yer, and Don Quixote a good name for the immortal 
knight. Why is Robinson Crusoe a good name for 
Robinson Crusoe, and Rip Van Winkle a good name 
for Rip Van Winkle, and Hamlet a good name for 
Hamlet? I don't know. (Neither do you.) But 
they are good names, you will admit. And good 
names, too, in their way, are: Mr. Sudgeberry, John 
Harkless, William Sylvanus Baxter, Hector J. Ran- 
som, Alonzo Rawson, May Parcher, Joe Bullitt, 



30 Booth Tarkington 

Mr. George Crooper (the "big, fat lummox"), Judge 
Pike, Eskew Arp, Bibbs, Bob Skillett, and so on 
and many more. Sometimes, too, it will be noted, 
Mr. Tarkington employs in his names a graceful 
literary suggestion, as in Joe Louden's "airy Spirit," 
Ariel; and the ominous connotation of the name 
"Claudine" startled Miss Tabor in Joe's office, and 
"the sense of a mysterious catastrophe oppressed 
her" in regard to Mrs. Fear. 

One of Mr. Tarkington's admirers has observed 
that "A Letter of Regrets" is as sympathetic to the 
spirit of its inspiration as Eugene Field's apprecia- 
tions of Horace; and it would be a curmudgeon dis- 
position that would quarrel with the observation. 
The point which particularly solicits attention, in 
the light of his later development, is that Mr. Tark- 
ington's early inspiration was almost always purely 
historical and distinctly "literary." A thing nat- 
ural enough. Jack London, whose "campus" was 
the San Francisco wharves, and their low doggeries, 
doubtless was somewhat oblivious of the romance of 
the days of powder, patches and perukes. But you 
wouldn't expect a normal college boy to be a very 
stern realist. He hasn't, particularly if he's one of 
the gilded youth, mentally seen any realism in life. 
He lives in an air of glamorous sentiment; life comes 
to him in terms of romance; and his aesthetic appre- 
ciation, if he have any, usually is an artistic percep- 



Booth Tarlcington 31 

tion of swashbuckle days. Mr. Tarkington, it is fur- 
ther to be noted, was thoroughly "normal," in other 
words even ordinary, in the matter of the period 
whose romance and literary flavor appealed to him 
above all others. Y e -01de-Cheshire-Cheese kind of 
thing is, of course, the most popular " quaintness " 
going. Another literary youth, Anatole France, felt 
that the spice of all romance was in the early lives of 
the saints: his Monsieur Beaucaire was Simeon 
Stylites. 

Though the extraordinary dual nature in Mr. 
Tarkington, which we have here to trace, was even 
then operative. He has been, apparently from the 
first, now out-and-out romanticist, now flatly the 
realist, — and at times has attempted to make oil 
and water mix. One of the most directly observed 
of the realistic chapters of The Gentleman from 
Indiana, the circus scene, appeared in an early 
version in one of the college publications when the 
author was still an undergraduate at Princeton. 
And this incident, I should say, early proved the 
naturally masculine quality of his mind. 

He was a consistent contributor, however, to the 
magazine John-a-Dreams during the years 1896 and 
1897. This was a pleasant magazine for the sophis- 
ticated — one might say, the decadent — taste; and 
was exactly the type of magazine which is the last 
thing in the world with which we associate Mr. 



32 Booth Tarkington 

Tarkington to-day. It had about it just about 
everything that the general public would not care 
for. John-a-Dreams announced itself on the cover 
as "a magazine for the conservative iconoclast and 
the practical dreamer." And it was, so its cover 
said, "devoted to mere literature and to classical 
typography." It was issued "about" the fifteenth 
of each month. "Mr. Dreams" (the magazine pro- 
fessed to "have no editor") declared, in "John-a- 
Dreams, His Ad," that he never expected "to have 
'a phenominal circulation' for his magazine." As 
"in printing it, he does not take Barbarians, Philis- 
tines, or Populace into account." Contributions and 
"suggestive correspondence" were solicited from "all 
true lovers of literature." John-a-Dreams had a very 
polished way of saying that it did not pay for "con- 
tributions." Accepted articles, "though protected 
during issue by copyright," were to be "strictly re- 
garded as the property of the author and as merely 
loaned to the magazine for one appearance." It 
was the wish of the persons in charge of the venture 
(whatever title they may have given themselves) that 
articles were to be anonymous or pseudonymous. 

Articles and pieces for John-a-Dreams were ac- 
cepted "in accordance with no canons save those of 
purest literary art"; "without reference to the name 
or fame of the author; without any pandering to the 
'popular' taste; and without any consideration of 






Booth Tarkington 33 

commercial value." The aim was "to do something 
for literature rather than with it." The magazine 
announced that it "must depend for its existence 
upon the interest and aid of a small class friendly 
to its ideals who may make it their own medium, a 
sort of literary masquerade that shall completely 
hoodwink the critics." It trusted that it would be 
able to "defray its own expenses." It insisted on 
itself writing the "copy" of all its advertisers, 
among whom were numbered such of its (likewise 
vanished) contemporaries as Chapters, A Monthly 
Magazine Devoted to Phases of Education and the 
By-ways of Literature, and The Month, In Literature, 
Art and Life: A Journal of Cultivation. Privately 
printed poetry, of "a vagrant and impulsive muse," 
intended for "the lover of belles-lettres and the col- 
lector of limited editions de luxe" were chief among 
the merchandise advertised. This, "one of the in- 
timately personal magazines of the day," as the 
Brooklyn Eagle called it, was, of course, "printed 
at ye sign" of such-and-such a "prefs" for "ye 
publishers." It was aesthetically bound in paper 
varying with each issue, sometimes the kind of 
paper in which meat is wrapped, sometimes in 
the kind which used to be "laid" under carpets. 
A prototype, in may respects, of this magazine 
which whimsically took as its name the term of 
"a dull and muddy-mettled rascal" in Hamlet 



34 Booth Tarhington 

Like John-a-Dreams, unpregnant of my cause, 
And can say nothing , 

was, of course, the periodical issued by Washington 
Irving and his brother-in-law, "youths to fortune 
and to fame unknown," and called Salmagundi. It 
was a magazine of the kind which in their individual 
lives are as perishable as the daffodils, but of which 
the type apparently is immortal. 

John-a-Dreams opened with The Stirrup Cup: "a 
dramatic vignette"; the scene: — tavern yard, France, 
sixteenth century. This was shortly followed by "A 
Pagan Love Song"; and a bit later by another 
"dramatic vignette," The Dark Way. Mr. Tarking- 
ton's contributions consisted both of illustrations 
and of some of the "pure literature." He held the 
purely honorary position of staff artist, and, be- 
cause he disclaimed all ability to draw, he was 
permitted to sign his sketches with his real name. 
But as he made some pretensions to an ability to 
write, he was compelled to sign all his literary con- 
tributions with the nom de plume "Cecil Woodford." 
The author, sometime later, of Penrod is found 
writing a poem, from the French of Baudelaire, 
"Love on the Skull." The most ambitious of Mr. 
Tarkington's John-a-Dreams pieces, and the most 
Tarkingtonian was his little one-act comedy called 
The Kisses of Marjorie, later pirated by a Western 



Booth Tarhington 35 

newspaper. The scene is laid in "Mrs. Mellowe's 
rose garden," Philadelphia, 1778. And the slender 
action of the piece is concerned with the coming, 
disguised, of Captain William Lawrence, aide-de- 
camp to Light Horse Lee, to a dance in order to see 
his sweetheart, Miss Marjorie Mellowes. 

As he is taking a tender farewell in the garden, he 
is discovered by Major McCurdy of His British 
Majesty's Foot, who is himself languishing for the 
fair Marjorie. At the critical moment Miss Marjorie 
"throws her arms about the Major's neck and kisses 
him twice, full upon the mouth." She then flies 
from him, and he, "breaking much crockery," pur- 
sues her around the garden for a time sufficient for 
Lawrence to make his escape. Then she rushes into 
the house and slams the door in his face. This brings 
the Major to himself, and, too late, he gives the 
alarm. The company dash from the house: 

All {shouting): What is it? What is the matter? 
What has happened? Where is he? Who was it? 
What does it mean? What is the matter? 

Maj. {in a voice falsetto with its strain of agony): 
Matter! Means! It means that an officer of Wash- 
ington's dragoons — a damned rebel spy! — has been 
spending the evening here — 

All: What! 

Maj. {gasping with rage): Ay, under our very 
noses! Dancing, making love — a damned botanical 



36 Booth Tarkington 

villain! — and escaped — gone — flown — fled — that in- 
fernal Faversham — Haversham — Henderson. 

Mrs. Mellowes: He! Can it be possible! No one 
could have dreamed it! How I have been deceived 
in the wretch! 

Maj. {with a burst of awful laughter): Ha, ha, ha! 
So was I, madam — so was I! Ha, ha! 

(Dorothy comes running from the house, white- 
faced, calling to Mrs. Mellowes.) 

Dorothy: Mother, mother, mother! Cousin Marj- 
orie hath gone mad ! She hath gone mad! She came 
leaping up stairs, weeping and screaming and laugh- 
ing dementedly, and calling for a bucket of water, 
she plunged her whole head in it a dozen times, 
madly, oh, so madly — her hair pasted and powdered 
and done as it was — until she is dreadful to see; and 
now she lies upon the bed and rubs her face with a 
great, rough towel, crying out: "The wine-bibber, 
oh, oh, the wine-bibber !" Haste to her before she 
dies. 

(The Major opens his mouth to speak, but no sound 
comes from it. He leans against the garden wall. En- 
sign Gay's eyes rest on him strangely. The Major's 
eyes refuse to meet the eyes of Ensign Gay.) 
Curtain. 

The Kisses of Marjorie, it will be seen, has a meas- 
ure of the Tarkington bouquet. At the time the 
little play was written Mr. Tarkington had a 
"hunch" that he could write a play for Richard 
Mansfield, and was having one effort after another 
"turned down" by that ornament of our stage. The 



Booth Tarkington 37 

main point, however, of The Kisses of Marjorie is the 
lucky part it played in the inscrutable workings of 
a young man's destiny. Mr. Tarkington made a 
number of drawings to accompany the play as illus- 
trations in the magazine. And, as has often been 
told, from one of these — that one of which the cap- 
tion runs, "The Major's eyes refuse to meet the 
eyes of Ensign Gay" — as the original lay on his 
desk and his fancy kept playing about it, he spun 
a romance into which the character with which he 
had endowed the little figures of the drawing would 
fit. Then (those were indeed the days of an amateur 
of the arts) this romance, Monsieur Beaucaire (it is 
said), lay in his desk two years before being sent to 
a publisher. 

Mr. Tarkington's early drawings, of which numer- 
ous specimens have been fondly exhibited in divers 
magazine sketches of the author, pique a more criti- 
cal attention than has before been given them. 
They show, very nearly, as small an ability as Thack- 
eray 's. Certain it is that a stern instructor at, say, 
the Art Students' League of New York, would not see 
in them the stroke of a student of any rare promise. 
It is amusing, if no more, to observe that Mr. Tark- 
ington's drawings, like his writings, are in two dis- 
tinctly different veins: some are conceived in the 
spirit of historical romanticism, and others in the 
spirit of realistic satire. His little set pieces, in the 



38 Booth Tarhington 

romantic vein, in which he really tried, and which 
combine a sort of Edwin Abbey sentiment with, 
very faintly, a kind of Du Maurier quality, are 
curiously feeble. The flair for human characteriza- 
tion by a pencil displayed by Mr. Chesterton fairly 
nonpluses the beholder instructed in the perception 
of such talent. And it seems a bit strange that an 
eye which will give you such a glimpse in prose as 
this from The Flirt: 

He was a slender young man in hot black clothes; 
he wore the unf acaded collar fatally and unanimously 
adopted by all adam's-apple men of morals; he was 
washed, fair, flat-skulled, clean-minded, and indus- 
trious; and the only noise of any kind he ever made 
in the world was on Sunday — in Sunday-school, 

should be so futile in grasp of character as Mr. 
Tarkington appears in his little "illustrations." 
While some of the drawings which he used to make 
— there pops into one's head one in particular, called 
"By-gone cheer" — had a bright effect of animation, 
they were in general (one must confess) stiff in 
drawing, "tight," timid, effeminate. That is, his 
rather ambitious little designs in romantic vein. 
His hasty scrawls in caricature of himself, frequent 
marginalia to his intimate letters, have strength and 
considerable spiritedness, and a good deal of jovial 
humor. In these is about the only place in his draw- 



Booth Tarkington 39 

ing wherein is revealed any perception of character. 
Mr. Tarkington's physiognomy is about as inviting 
to caricature as that of the late Phil May's, and 
there is in his self-caricatures something of the 
Phil-Mayian relish of the artist's own humorous 
appearance. For what it may be worth in the way 
of suggestion, it should be noted that as a draughts- 
man Mr. Tarkington's forte was, or is, in satire. Of 
course, it is very "nice" that Mr. Tarkington liked to 
"draw," and (though it is difficult to say exactly why) 
everybody likes him the better for it; but, the up- 
shot of the matter is, it is perfectly splendid that he 
concluded that he couldn't. 

It was in 1893, before his John-a-Dreams pleasan- 
tries, that Mr. Tarkington took his degree of A. M. 
at Princeton, and went from his alma mater with 
(so the story goes) something of a general under- 
standing round about him that he was to devote 
himself to literary work. Naturally, it is reported, 
there were many of his own class, and some of 
maturer years, who looked for almost immediate 
achievement. And it is not unlikely that he him- 
self may have entertained the immemorial notion of 
meteoric youth, that the world was already his 
oyster. Doubtless, as Mr. Arthur Bartlett Maurice 
conjectures in his article on Mr. Tarkington in The 
Bookman of a number of years ago, there was some- 
thing of Mr. Tarkington's own disillusionment in 



40 Booth Tarhington 

his description of John Harkless, "the Great Hark- 
less," occupied with a realization that "there had 
been a man in his class whose ambition needed no 
restraint, his promise was so complete — in the strong 
belief of the University, a belief that he could not 
help knowing — and that seven years to a day from 
his Commencement this man was sitting on a fence 
rail in Indiana." And Mr. Maurice adds, "sitting on 
a rail-fence in Indiana was figuratively just what 
Tarkington was doing from 1893 to 1899." Just so. 
Though, all in all, it was a decidedly figurative 
fence-rail. 

Mr. Tarkington might have said with quite as 
much truth as Stevenson, "All through my boy- 
hood and youth, I was known and pointed out for 
the pattern of an idler." Indeed, until in the neigh- 
borhood of his thirtieth year his career seems to 
have been regarded by his fellow-townsmen in the 
light of a rather attractive joke. He was "a big 
duck in the puddle" in all affairs of "society" in his 
home town. A young man of fashion, quite the 
young man about town, he served a hard schooling 
indeed in the life of balls and "junketings" which 
so frequently lights the scene in his stories. Espe- 
cially did he "ride a high horse" in the goings-on of 
the local Dramatic Club. His principal visible busi- 
ness, according to old rumor, was gallant courtesy 
to every visiting petticoat of quality. According to 



Booth Tarhington 41 

an old classmate, lie was (then) "a romanticist in 
life as in literature." 

And yet, equally with R. L. S., this other "idler," 
too, was always busy on his own private end, which 
was — not an ordinary thing to-day — "to learn to 
write." Those roving in the nocturnal depths past 
the Tarkington homestead at that period of the 
idler's business remarked what, if they had then 
thought of it that way, was the mark of a late 
student: the lamp at midnight hour, seen in the 
high, lonely tower, which did oft' outwatch the well- 
known Bear, and so on. It was probably a con- 
sciousness of the foolish look which his unrewarded 
activities may have had outside that caused Mr. 
Tarkington at that time modestly to describe the 
serious schooling which he gave himself as "fussin' 
with literachoor." 

Much of what he wrote at that time, one gathers 
from him, was for no definite ulterior use; it was 
written consciously for practice, or perhaps done 
unconscious of that aim. The symptoms are the 
readily recognizable ones of the birth throes of an 
innate vocation. It was not so much that he wished 
to be an author (though he wished that too) as that 
instinct impelled him to acquire proficiency in the 
art of writing, just as instinct moves a cat to look 
out for rats, and a horse to decline meat. Like that 
other "idle apprentice," he industriously "played 



42 Booth Tarhington 

the sedulous ape" to many and diverse masters. 
Whenever he read a book or a passage that particu- 
larly struck him he, too, must straightway react to 
it in imitation of it, or in satire upon it. He gave a 
story of this time to Riley, without comment, to 
learn "what was the matter with it." Riley went 
through the manuscript carefully "correcting" archa- 
isms, until he could stand his exasperation no longer, 
when upon the margin he denounced the whole 
thing as "pure Goldsmith." And so, of course, the 
young student of the style of the eighteenth century 
(that most literary of centuries which lays its spell 
upon all young, ardent spirits) had designed his 
story to be. A dodge in impersonation, it was; a 
"purely ventriloquial effort," as that other "sedulous 
ape" said of his "monkey tricks" after the manner, 
in turn, of a fearful medley of masters, from Sir 
Thomas Browne to Swinburne. 

"Writing like a streak" has never yet "come 
natural." Mr. Tarkington's testimony is that of 
all artists. "There are no teachers," he says, look- 
ing hard into his past. "We must work it out 
alone. We must learn by failure and by repeated 
efforts how the thing should be done." If for no 
other reason than because of the salutary effect 
attention to his preliminary proceedings should have 
upon a host of those who aspire to become authors 
over night, there is, it may be submitted, occasion 



Booth Tarkington 43 

for a handy guide (such as this) to the methods of 
one of the most highly rewarded, most representa- 
tive, least "literary," and most "modern" of our 
writers. The author of the Lucius Brutus Allen 
stories is perceived learning his trade quite in the 
manner practised by the painters and craftsmen of 
old, patiently equipping himself in the classic way, 
by a painstaking interrogation of the secrets of the 
masters of the past. He "practised the literary 
scales," as the author of Memories and Portraits says; 
who adds: "That, like it or not, is the way to learn 
to write:" 

It is only after years of such gymnastic that one 
can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to 
his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously 
biddmg for his choice, and he himself knowing what 
he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a 
man's ability) able to do it. 

Within the narrow limit of his ability, Mr. Tark- 
ington to-day, I have heard it vowed, can on occa- 
sion write 10,000 words in a day. 

Anyone whose business it has been (for his sins) 
to review the muck of books from morning till 
night, or any whose travail it is to be a publisher's 
reader, will tell you that it is easy writing that 
makes his life one of hard reading, that the absence 
among American authors of the result of the "gym- 



44 Booth Tarkington 

nastic" which gives facility of expression is lament- 
able and extraordinary. Everyone does not con- 
sciously feel the charm of a thing by which Mr. 
Tarkington sets much store, the way in which a 
book is written. But everyone does like his reading 
to be clear, easy to understand. Mr. Tarkington's 
style is a curiously fluid one, which changes its 
color with every turn; but in this, in clarity, con- 
spicuous among our authors, popular and unpopular, 
he has seldom failed to bless his reader. 

It is the creed of a celebrated French master that 
it is the author's business to make truth beautiful, 
and nothing is beautiful but what is easy in its 
effect; that an artist who knows his trade will "not 
so much exact attention as surprise it"; and that 
obscurity, difficulty, is but a kind of bad manners. 
"Elegant, facile, rapid," he says, "there you have 
the perfect politeness of a writer." In sum, Mr. 
Tarkington's style, with all its complete modernity 
to-day, is such a style as comes of good breeding, 
of having early assimilated the atmosphere of the 
best literary society, that is of first-rate writers. 
Neatness, precision, ease, moderation, lightness of 
touch, lucidity, these, in general, are its qualities. 
He is clever without being smart, and pointed 
without emphasis. As for that dreadful something 
which goes by the name of rhetoric, you may search 
his volumes through without finding a trace of it. 



Booth Tarhington 45 

Brilliancy, surprise, felicities, originalities, — all these 
he "wears like a flower." The qualities which, in 
general, form the basis of his changing style, the 
way in which his various books are written, occur 
to one as the classical French qualities. And so, it 
is interesting to note that of thirteen "favorite au- 
thors" which he has named, no less than four are 
Frenchmen: Cherbuliez, Daudet, Balzac, and Dumas. 
He has said that he reads more autobiography, pre- 
ferably French, than anything else. 

As an apprentice, of course, Mr. Tarkington "had 
the drop on" a good many; he had plenty of time; 
there was no hurry. Among other things, he learned 
pretty well, from his seat on the fence rail, that, 
unlike John-a-Dreams, which depended for its ex- 
istence "upon a small class friendly to its ideals," 
magazines which make a business of being maga- 
zines do consider the "popular" taste and take 
thought of the "commercial value" of work pur- 
chased. In the course of time, his grasp on this 
idea surpassed in an astonishing way that of most 
young men who make a John-a-Dreams, or London- 
Poetry-Shop, or Greenwich- Village-Garret kind of a 
beginning. Though the character of the litterateur, 
which becomes an abiding shell for some who enter 
it, was with Mr. Tarkington but a sort of "cham- 
bered nautilus." He wrote and re- wrote his experi- 
ments, which were "rejected every time"; and he 



46 Booth Tarhington 

has confessed that the gross return from his first 
five years of effort was exactly $22.50. 

Monsieur Beaucaire — in preparation for writing 
which, its publishers used to announce (before Mr. 
Tarkington stopped it), the author read forty books 
— for long failed to "get across." And a diary 
which Mr. Tarkington's father used to keep con- 
tains repeated entries stating the return of The 
Gentleman from Indiana from such or such a pub- 
lishing house. At length, Mr. McClure was pre- 
vailed upon to "see" it. For eight years Mr. Tark- 
ington had, so to put it, served for Rachel. 



IV 

WITH what is termed the New School of 
"young English realists" in our eye, it 
is an interesting thing to do to turn 
back for a glance at a type of native novel which 
was all the go with us at about the time when the 
nineteenth century was going out and the present 
century coming in. Among these early imitations 
(paradoxically speaking) of the latest thing in fiction 
one finds such one-time "best-sellers" as Brand 
Whitlock's Thirteenth District, Mr. Tarkington's 
Gentleman from Indiana, The Virginians of Owen 
Wister, and, coming after these, The Pit and The 
Octopus of Frank Norris. Devotees of the importa- 
tions of the "new crowd," Walpole, Onions, Gilbert 
Cannan, Beresford, and the rest, should find some- 
thing fascinatingly fresh about the manner of much 
of one, in particular, of these now more or less re- 
tired American novels, one published in 1899, The 
Gentleman from Indiana. 

If Plattville, Carlow County, were situated off the 
Tottenham Court Road, or if it were somewhere in, 
say, Cornwall; if the Palace Hotel bore the aromatic 
name of The Bending Mule, or some such thing; 
then in many respects Plattville's chronicle would 

47 



48 Booth Tarkington 

be decidedly in the literary fashion of the last 
several years. Though, indeed, to complete this 
effect the very open and elementary character of 
the amateur country editor of the Carlow County 
Herald ought to be that of an author of introspective 
tendencies and psychological temper whose work can 
command the attention only of the "thoughtful." 
At any rate, the young Indiana author began his 
book in the most approved method of recent real- 
ism: that of simply opening his eyes and setting 
down what he saw, and what he thought about the 
things that he saw, together with an infusion of 
autobiographic imagination. Mr. Tarkington had 
the recipe all right, but he was unable to sustain 
the pedestrian mood. 

Perhaps he feared he would be dull. One English 
reviewer, writing in the Saturday Review, remarked 
that Mr. Tarkington had set himself to depict "the 
irredeemable dulness of provincial life in the United 
States," and that his "success was phenomenal." 
While it should be added that another, and more 
critical writer, laid stress, in the Academy, on the 
"continual surprising wittiness" of the book. "Wit- 
tiness" is the word, if but one word could be used, 
to ticket the outstanding attraction of The Gentle- 
man from Indiana, Not only does the narrative 
crackle with wit, but the village worthies themselves 
(the "human society" which gave the Saturday 



Booth Tarkington 49 

Review-er such an "ineffaceable impression of dreari- 
ness") frequently speak in dialogue, in their own 
peculiar idiom, with something of the high sparkle 
of the characters in The Importance of Being Ernest. 
With the passing of the years the character of Mr. 
Tarkington's wit has greatly changed. The searing 
flashes of The Turmoil are far from the playful 
twinkle of The Gentleman from Indiana. But, 
throughout his work, if he had no other distinction, 
he should, I think it is safe to say, bear that of the 
wittiest of our novelists. 

The author of The Gentleman from Indiana had 
several things on his chest to speak. The soundest 
of his inspirations was the impulse to paint a sym- 
pathetic picture of contemporary life in the Ohio 
valley. He presented the semi-urban type cele- 
brated in Riley verse. And he stood with the Hoo- 
sier poet as the exponent of a Hoosier, kindly, gen- 
erous, humorous, as idiosyncratic of the soil as the 
Wessex peasants of Hardy, and essentially domestic. 
As a realist the future iconoclastic author of The Tur- 
moil began as a thoroughly sympathetic fictional his- 
torian. His mood was that which was the mode 
among Hoosier writers, one of enthusiastic apprecia- 
tion. The author of The Gentleman from Indiana 
entered the procession of authors of a local litera- 
ture that has followed the progressive years of the 
life of the Hoosier community; a story begun by 



50 Booth TarJcington 

Dr. Edward Eggleston, and which has been con- 
tinued by Miss Anna Nicholas, author of An Idyl 
of the Wabash, by Riley, Mr. Meredith Nicholson, 
and again Mr. Tarkington, each adding valuable 
and instructive chapters. 

The distinctive character of Plattville as a "county 
seat" of the central West at the time of the story 
is well established; and its provincial indolence, rus- 
tic amiability, and mammoth "civic" pride are re- 
flected with a sentimental fidelity. Mr. Tarkington 
presented a perfect appreciation of the strength of 
local affection in the simon-pure Hoosier, who goes 
away mainly for the joy of getting back home again; 
and of the thoroughly American absorption in poli- 
tics which seems to be more marked in county 
seats of a few thousand inhabitants than in large 
cities, and more marked in the Hoosier than in any 
other "critter" under the sun, as "a Hoosier will 
talk politics after he is dead." The author was well 
with the statisticians in emphasizing the homo- 
geneity of the Middle Western folk of the period. 
The people of Plattville live together like a great, 
kind family, who are sufficient unto themselves, and 
content with their own: 

It would have moved their surprise as much as 
their indignation to hear themselves spoken of as a 
"secluded community"; for they sat up all night 
to hear the vote of New York, every campaign. 



Booth Tarhington 51 

Once when the President visited Rouen, seventy 
miles away, there were only a few bankrupts (and 
not a baby amongst them) left in the deserted homes 
of Carlow County. 

All this "happy, happy time," too, was before the 
day of the great "smoke," which since has steadily 
been darkening the Indiana sky in (and out of) Mr. 
Tarkington's stories, until in towns that sky has 
become "so despised, and maltreated there, that 
from early October to mid-May it is impossible for 
men to remember that blue is the rightful color 
overhead.' ' In Plattville, remember, in the days 
when John Harkless was editor of the Carlow County 
Herald, there were no skies half so beautiful, nor 
any so "sociable," as Indiana skies: 

Skies as blue 

As the eyes of children when they smile at you. 

One of the peculiarities of Indiana literature is 
that to the stranger, particularly to the "unagrarian 
Eastern traveller," the effect of the Indiana land- 
scape is one of dreary monotony, of depressing dull- 
ness; and yet practically every Hoosier writer of 
any note at all, from Dr. Eggleston on, has been to 
a marked degree sensitive to the loveliness of his 
landscape, and has had an artistic feeling for weather. 
Except in a very few places, the Indiana landscape 
certainly is totally without "scenery." As it is with- 



52 Booth Tarhington 

out grandeur, so it is without intriguing charms. 
But, it is clear, to those that love it, its face is that 
of a plain, kind, old friend. And a relationship may 
be fancied between it and the homely rural Hoosier 
dialect, and so, too, between it and the simple vir- 
tues of the pioneers, and the instinct universal 
among the people for a plain, level-headed "phil- 
osophy." At any rate, it does seem to have had a 
kind of moral influence on the native literature. 

The whole Indiana school of writers might fanci- 
fully be distinguished by the sobriquet of the Amer- 
ican "landscape school," amusingly suggestive of the 
"little masters" of flat Holland. No Indiana writer, 
perhaps, has had more of a painter's eye for land- 
scape or a poet's heart for weather than the author 
of The Gentleman from Indiana. In this book the 
homely beauty of pastures, level fields, quiet mead- 
ows and woodlands, and the broad flat lands which 
stretch out "as though the whole earth were before 
one," is everywhere felt, and with a touch of no- 
bility which is one of the distinctions of the book. 
This is quite like a canvas that might be seen in the 
studio of one of the Hoosier group of painters, Mr. 
T. C. Steele, or Mr. Otto Stark: 



He felt the light and life about him; heard the 
clatter of the blackbirds above him; heard the hom- 
ing bees hum by, and saw the vista of white road and 
level landscape, framed on two sides by the branches 






Booth Tarkington 53 

of the grove, a vista of infinitely stretching fields of 
green, lined here and there with woodlands and flat 
to the horizon line, the village lying in their lap. 
No roll of meadow, no rise of pasture land, relieved 
their serenity nor shouldered up from them to be 
called a hill. A second great flock of blackbirds 
was settling down over the Piatt ville maples. As 
they hung in the fair dome of the sky below the few 
white clouds, it occurred to Harkless that some sup- 
ping god had inadvertently peppered his custard, 
and now inverted and emptied his gigantic blue 
dish upon the earth, the innumerable little black 
dots seeming to poise for a moment, then floating 
slowly down from the heights. 

Mr. Tarkington was not so fortunate as Conrad 
in Victory in having handy a volcano to smoulder 
in the background of the scene of his wild tragedy, 
but he too set the stage of his night drama, the 
attack of the White Caps on John Harkless, with a 
first-rate bit of dramatic weather. 

Another characteristic trait of the Indiana author 
is his gladness in the earth's bountiful yield for the 
sustenance of man, and particularly his emotional 
relish for the home products of the soil. 

The frost is on the punkin, 
And the fodder's in the shock. 

An Indiana novel usually "sets a good table"; and 
pumpkins, pawpaws, fried chicken, young "roas'n- 
ears," "home-grown" watermelon, hot rolls "as light 




54 Booth Tarkington 

as the fluff of a summer cloudlet," milk and honey, 
apple-butter flavored like the spices of Arabia, fra- 
grant, flaky cherry-pie, and cool, rich, yellow cream: 
these are among the staples with which the reader 
is regaled. Despite the fare at the Palace Hotel, 
there are in The Gentleman from Indiana, one will 
venture to say, as "good eats" as in any novel readily 
at hand. There is plenty and to spare for every 
reader out at Judge Briscoe's. "Lige Willetts was 
a lover, yet he said he asked no better than to just 
go on eating that cherry pie till a sweet death over- 
took him." 

An artistic incongruity inherent in a number of 
Mr. Tarkington's longer stories is, early and through- 
out, pronounced in his first novel: that is, charac- 
ters least essential, or quite unessential to the story, 
are among the truest in drawing. Sometimes, as in 
The Two Vanrevels, the servant is greater (as art) 
than the master. One of the most memorable char- 
acters, to my mind, in The Gentleman from Indiana, 
is the most insignificant of all: red-haired Cynthy 
in a blue cotton gown, who at the "Palace" lan- 
guidly waved over the dining table a long instru- 
ment made of clustered strips of green and yellow 
tissue paper fastened to a wooden wand. "With 
this she amiably amused the flies except at such 
times as the conversation proved too interesting, 
when she was apt to rest it on the shoulder of one of 



Booth Tarhington 55 

the guests." Cynthy's very natural romantic at- 
traction to Mr. Harkless, reaching its climax in her 
clumsy inability to pin a flower on the lapel of his 
coat, is in itself material for a little play. Come to 
think of it, did not Mr. Israel Zangwill employ an 
almost identical motif in his Merely Mary Ann? 
Cynthy (by Harkless always called Charmion; no 
one knew why) is not a part of the plot, but she is 
a part of the history. 

As a historian Mr. Tarkington is sound enough, 
too, in his lurid Cross-Roaders; who, of course, are 
not authentic White Caps at all, but merely a set- 
tlement of rowdies, analogous to the denizens of 
the tough neighborhood found in cities, and who 
masquerade as a vigilance committee merely for 
purposes of private mischief and revenge. As 
pointed out by Mr. Nicholson in his little study of 
the Hoosier commonwealth, the author follows ac- 
curately the social history of the good stock and 
the bad of Carlow County, illustrating the antip- 
athy existing between the prosperous and intelligent 
and the idle and ignorant. The hostility between 
the people of Plattville and the Cross Roads element 
dates back to the first movement of population on 
the long trail from North Carolina into the Ohio 
valley. The Cross Roads folk had been evil and 
worthless in their early homes, and they carried 
their worst traits with them into Indiana. 



56 Booth Tarkington 

Though his methods were different, the author of 
The Gentleman from Indiana, like the author of The 
Turmoil (and like the father of the English novel, 
Fielding), was a moralist. What, apparently, he un- 
dertook to say about a young man from the East 
who found himself in a somnolent Western town, 
where by driving himself day and night he had suc- 
ceeded in instilling some sort of life into the place 
and at the same time had made himself the most 
important and respected of its citizens, and who 
yet was discouraged because he believed that he 
had the ability to succeed, but felt that he lacked 
the opportunity — was this little homily: that the 
best way to play a big part before a large audience 
to-morrow, is to play, with all your heart and all 
your soul and all your mind, your little part before 
your small audience to-day. The trouble was that, 
before he got through, the author of his first Moral- 
ity Play was saying this at the top of his voice, in a 
regular din. 

As a historian of Hoosier manners Mr. Tarkington 
has from the first brought to bear on his picture an 
element elsewhere lacking. The editor of the Car- 
low County Herald was a type of Hoosier new at that 
time and place; one who has little kinship with the 
earlier people of Eggleston, or with the Hoosier as 
Riley reports him. Though a native, he had ex- 
perienced at an Eastern college an intellectual 



Booth Tarkington 57 

change "into something rich and strange," and 
after long absence became a pilgrim of light among 
his own people. Mr. Tarkington is very fond of the 
wanderer returned, hero or villain, — Harkless, Joe 
Louden, Valentine Corliss, Bibbs. And by this de- 
vice he continually achieves a critical perspective 
for his Hoosier scene. 

The historian and moralist who created John 
Harkless was also considerable of a sentimentalist. 
Mr. Harkless in his bucolic environment does a lot 
of young-man mooning, very sympathetically re- 
ported by the author. "This romancer of petti- 
coats" "knew himself for a born lover; he had al- 
ways been in love with someone." — "Though for 
five years the lover in him that had loved so often 
had been starved of all but dreams." — "Somewhere 
there was a girl whom he had never seen, who 
waited till he should come. She was Everything." 
— "The Undine danced before him through the 
lonely years." And so on and so on. Mr. Harkless 
moons, too, much pleasant, youthful dear old alma 
mater sentiment. 

Mr. Harkless may not be quite so much The Man 
of Feeling as Henry Mackenzie's celebrated hero who, 
it will be remembered, dies from the shock he re- 
ceives when a Scotch maiden of pensive face and 
mild hazel eyes acknowledges that she can return 
his love for her; but he is, of course, a thoroughly 



58 Booth Tarkington 

sentimental conception. A crowning touch of this 
is the Marcus-Aurelius-like nobility of his soul. As 
the "great Harkless" conies home on the "accommo- 
dation train" from his convalescence at Rouen he 
forgives his enemies, the Cross-Roaders, quite out of 
one of the "meditations" of the sublime Emperor: 
"There was ignorance in man, but no unkindness; 
were man utterly wise he were utterly kind." Mr. 
Tarkington's conception of fiction has ever been 
fundamentally the simple one of the early minstrels 
and troubadours, the ancient fabulists, and the for- 
gotten spinners of the world's first nursery tales. 
He must have his Odysseus. He has never taken 
up with the Thackerayan humor, much the fashion 
since Meredith, of "a novel without a hero." 

The "awkwardness" and "clumsy heaviness" of 
the style of The Gentleman from Indiana has been 
repeatedly spoken of. From the somewhat lumber- 
ing manner of The Gentleman from Indiana to the 
debonair spirit and cameo-cut sentences of Monsieur 
Beaucaire is indeed a far cry. But the garments 
worn by His Highness, Prince Louis-Philippe de 
Valois, duke of this and duke of that, and all the 
rest of it, and the circle in which he moved at Bath, 
would have ill-become John Harkless and the Platt- 
ville folk among whom he dwelt. The style of The 
Gentleman from Indiana is not artistically infelicitous; 
it is only fair to fancy it as very much the style of 



Booth Tarkington 59 

a young country editor, and so not without a cer- 
tain harmony with the theme. The sentences, cer- 
tainly, are frequently over-long for complete comfort 
to the reader, and there may be something a bit 
amateurish, the wordiness of a young writer, in the 
touch; but there is, too, an instinctive feeling for the 
right word, and a good deal of luck (or determination) 
in finding it. 

Mr. Tarkington mentioned, some years ago, that of 
English authors he preferred Meredith, Stevenson, 
James, Wells, Bennett and Hardy; and Mr. Ben- 
nett, we know, is a close personal friend. In his 
quiet moments, in the amiable refinement of his 
alert observation of prosaic things, one finds through- 
out Mr. Tarkington's books many touches which 
imply an affinity of mind with Mr. James. Flashes 
of the Mr. James mood are particularly frequent in 
The Gentleman from Indiana. Confronted with this 
fact, Mr. Tarkington, with at first a surprised, and 
then with a sheepish look, as though having been 
caught in something wrong, admitted that he had 
read a good deal of Mr. James "at about that time." 
Among the guests of Mr. Meredith's party at Rouen 
were three or four married young couples who 
"had the air of remembering that they had for- 
gotten the baby." And this, certainly, would seem 
to come from a very apt student of the suave 
master: 



60 Booth Tarhington 






In the hall he removed his narrow-brimmed straw 
hat and presented a rotund and amiable head, from 
the top of which his auburn hair seemed to retire 
with a sense of defeat; it fell back, however, not in 
confusion, but in perfect order, and the sparse pink 
mist left upon his crown gave, by a supreme effort, 
an effect of arrangement, so that an imaginative 
observer would have declared that there was a part 
down the middle. 

The sober half of The Gentleman from Indiana, 
that of earnest inspiration, is work of striking prom- 
ise, a promise which, indeed, there has been some 
reason to feel the author had not until fairly re- 
cently begun altogether to fulfill. Professor Phelps, 
in his volume on the English novel, states his 
passing fear of four or five years ago "that the 
brilliant gifts of this Hoosier were going to be de- 
graded to the production of the girl-model of the 
year." 

A trait which may be taken as characteristic of 
Mr. Tarkington, as it appears in nearly all — except 
the most recent — of his novels, is particularly evi- 
dent in The Gentleman from Indiana. The hot- 
footed action of many of his stories has (to the 
sedate mind) an effect comparable to a motion 
picture film worked at a bit too high a speed. The 
rapid march toward success of the rascally schemes 
of Mr. Valentine Corliss in The Flirt comes quickly 



Booth TarJcington 61 

to mind as an instance of this very high gear in the 
machinery of a story. And Harkless accomplishes 
a number of rather difficult things with perhaps too 
much ease and promptness. He rescues his paper 
from a moribund condition and makes it an insti- 
tution of local pride and fame; in the twinkling of 
an eye he drives an unscrupulous political boss from 
power, and ushers in a new era of honest govern- 
ment; he declares war against the bad 'uns of the 
squalid Cross Roads, who for years have terrorized 
the neighborhood; and his crusade results in sending 
a considerable number of them "over the road." 
All this, of course, is not outside the range of proba- 
bility; and the author fills in his body of detail with 
an intellectual honesty ardent,— but not incorrupt- 
ible. 

The spectator of Mr. Tarkington throughout his 
career is reminded of George Gray Barnard's sculp- 
ture, "Two natures contending within man." First 
one prevails, then the other. The two spirits that 
have made Mr. Tarkington a theatre of combat are 
realism and romanticism, and romanticism confused 
with a realistic setting is, of course, melodrama. 
The Gentleman from Indiana began, and maintained 
itself fairly well half way through, as a serious and 
valuable transcript of manners; and then it became 
a burst of purple glamour not of this world. Its 
author was like Mr. Dobson in his triolet: 



-62 Booth Tarkington 

Urceus Exit 

I intended an Ode, 
And it turn'd to a Sonnet. 

It began a la mode, 

I intended an Ode; 

But Rose cross'd the road 
In her latest new bonnet; 

I intended an Ode; 
And it turn'd to a Sonnet. 

As late even as The Flirt Mr. Tarkington has at 
times manifested a curious inability to, so to say, 
keep his eye on the ball. 

In The Gentleman from Indiana, long before the 
lurid big business the tempter is felt. Harkless's 
picturesque bravado before Miss Sherwood, his non- 
chalant attitude toward the White Caps who are 
after him, is a bit in the taste of the top gallery. It 
is tall talk to stir the naive. Though mention should 
be made here of one of Mr. Tarkington's very be- 
guiling traits, a trick slyly disarming to the critic. 
His own intelligence has always apparently been 
quite awake to what he was doing; the delinquencies 
in art have seemed to be a matter of the will. In 
practically every instance throughout his stories, as 
he commits one of his foibles, melodramatic or sen- 
timental, he implies a complete consciousness of the 
temper of what he has on foot. — "It was melodrama, 
wasn't it?" asked Helen Sherwood of John Harkless, 



Booth Tarkington 63 

of the scene of the attempted shooting of Harkless 
through which they had just passed. 

"You may come in now. This isn't my court- 
house:" this, Harkless's remark to the mob in pur- 
suit of the shell-game men, is, of course, a "gesture" 
spang at the gallery-god; and the reader hears the 
shrill emotional whistles from above. But there is 
plenty of sure-enough drama, not in the least to be 
sneezed at, in the climax struck by the clang in the 
night of the court-house bell, the bell that had 
tolled for the death of Morton, of Garfield, of Hen- 
dricks. . . . The bell clamored it far and near: the 
White Caps had got Mr. Harkless! Then the au- 
thor begins to pile up the bad business, and his 
humor broadens into the "comic relief " supplied by 
the town sot Mr. Wilkerson, tearfully looking under 
barroom chairs for the lost Mr. Harkless. 

The "John Brown's Body" procession which 
marches upon the Cross Roads to wipe out that 
unsavory settlement is one that ought to satisfy 
all the demands of a very warm imagination. When 
public suspicion as to who got John Harkless be- 
comes divided between the White Caps and the 
pair of shell-men whom he had taken a leading 
hand in driving out of town, the ensuing situation 
is one of considerable dramatic fervor. The tele- 
gram from the neighboring city of Rouen pointing 
to the guilt of one of the shell-men, apparently now 



64 Booth Tarkington 

at the point of death, which heads off the lynching 
party; the delegation from Piatt ville arriving at the 
Rouen hospital to take the shell-man's dying con- 
fession; the mangled object's opening its eyes and 
speaking with the voice of Harkless: — fairly skillful 
craftsmanship, all this (if a bit on the mystery 
story order); the surprise, when it comes, is sur- 
prising; and the whole story has been worked up 
with a painstaking diligence of details, an ingenious 
effect of plausibility that (if you are not too exacting) 
effectually veil the underlying melodrama. 

But from this point on, our fairly solid, historical 
old friend, The Gentleman from Indiana, is, as Kip- 
ling used to say, "another story." It is good fun 
enough, but, quite as rigorous critics of the story 
have already pointed out, it is sheer romanticism. 
The miracles which Helen Sherwood performs with 
Mr. Harkless's paper in his absence are — miracles 
indeed. "Her educational equipment for the work 
was far less than his; her experience, nothing." Her 
imposing on Harkless an idea of herself as a six 
footer, and a journalist with an amazingly con- 
glomerate knowledge of drilling for oil, politics, 
ladies' work-baskets and currant jelly, may only be 
accepted as of the quality of a joke. The pranks of 
the office force of the Herald, and the jests of the 
very likable Schofield's Henry, though undeniably 
funny, are the kind of humor termed "cutting up." 



Booth Tarkington 65 

And the burst of purple glory at the end, when the 
"Great Harkless" comes home to bands and stream- 
ers, and cheers enough to make the sensitive reader 
hold his ears, is a dream of a conquering hero's return, 
in the youthfulness of its conception even Penrodian. 
All in all, however, The Gentleman from Indiana 
was, as a first novel, a famous victory. It has, in an 
abundant measure, the prime quality of a work of 
fiction: characters that, though drawn in simple 
lines, seem thoroughly alive; characters, by the score, 
in whom one cannot help feeling a warm, lovable 
human nature. It is a book that one is curiously 
bound by his own good nature to like, and to like 
a good deal, even with full consciousness of its 
violent artistic inconsistencies and abounding ab- 
surdities. It has style, even distinction, a degree of 
intellectual substance, and genuine, unflagging wit. 
Taken altogether, it remains to-day one of the most 
interesting and one of the most creditable novels 
written of bygone life in the Ohio valley. One 
thing was as plain as a pikestaff: this new writer had 
the root of the matter in him. The Gentleman from 
Indiana bespeaks attention at some considerable 
length for the reason that one is tempted to say that 
it contains in embryo the full complement of Mr. 
Tarkington *s box of tricks. Though the truth of such 
a cavalier statement might be hard to prove at one 
or two points. 



66 Booth Tarkington 

Of satire, malice, there was not a trace in the 
heart of the author of The Gentleman from Indiana, 

"Look," said Helen. "Aren't they good, the dear 
people? " 

"The beautiful people!" he answered. 

On numerous pages the author almost wept with 
affection for the dear, good people of the broad 
flat lands of "home." When Mr. Tarkington wrote 
The Turmoil he felt that he was likely to be tarred 
and feathered and ridden on a rail by the men and 
women o' Marble'ead, to borrow a figure of speech. 
Instead, to his amazement, he was stopped on the 
street with words of praise. How did his early 
paean strike the dwellers in his own cherished land? 
Sometime after the publication of The Gentleman 
from Indiana, Mr. Tarkington, in a magazine arti- 
cle called "Temptations of a Young Author," told 
patently of himself under the name of a young 
man called Lukens: 

This young man had grown up in Colestown and 
he liked the people; he wrote a novel about them, 
bragging about them, telling all who were willing 
to read that the Colestown folks were the best and 
greatest on earth. He brought his manuscript to 
New York, and a publisher accepted it and printed 
it. Lukens was almost ashamed to go back to Coles- 
town; he had written about it so much from his 



Booth Tarhington 67 

heart that he was as embarrassed as Barrie says a 
man is who has told another man that he likes him. 
When he got off the boat, the youth who drives a 
buckboard for the Colestown Hotel looked at him 
icily and said, "Well, you've got your nerve to 
come back here after writing that book about us!" 

"What's the matter?" asked Lukens, trembling. 

"You've defamed the sacred altars," said the 
other. "You said Colestown wasn't as big as Paris. 
And you never mentioned Bangor, nor Portland, 
nor Augusta. You said Colestown was quiet, and 
gave the impression that there wasn't a building 
in the place as big as the pyramid of Cheops." 

"But there isn't!" protested the young man. 

"Go on!" replied the other. "You're a traitor. 
Sneak!" 

On his way through the town to his house Lukens 
was stoned, and the city marshal threw his baton at 
him. The Colestown weekly paper came out that 
evening (two days ahead of time) with two columns 
of denunciation, headed, "Treat Him With Silent 
Contempt or a Brick." 

The young men of the town serenaded him all 
night with tin cans, dinner-bells and resined timber. 
Lukens was conscious of a strong temptation to re- 
main indoors, and yielded to it. 



IF in The Gentleman from Indiana Mr. Tark- 
ington essayed a mongrel genre, and didn't 
quite "get away with" the monstrosity, in his 
next appearance before the world he demonstrated 
beyond all manner of doubt that he was born to the 
purple. Monsieur Beaucaire, first written in 1897, 
sent to a magazine and returned with the conven- 
tional rejection slip with which Mr. Tarkington in 
those days was as familiar as anybody, then re- 
written, achieved book publication (after appearing 
in McClure's Magazine) in 1900. Its success was 
instantaneous and immense. As a contribution to 
the romantic school it has been described as a 
charming jeu d'esprit. And it has happily been 
compared with Dumas's Three Guardsmen as a 
humming-bird to an eagle; "yet" (as Professor 
Phelps says) "its brightness has not faded with the 
passing summer of romance." Monsieur Beaucaire 
was one of those very occasional bits of fiction which 
are absolutely sui generis. It was distinctive in its 
year in the same way The Prisoner of Zenda had 
been in its day, and the analogy has been carried 
further in that both in Monsieur Beaucaire and 



Booth Tarkington 69 

Anthony Hope's prodigious success a suggestion has 
been found of Stevenson. 

Where are the romances of y ester year? In the 
middle '90's an extraordinary thing began to hap- 
pen to English fiction. This has been variously ex- 
plained. Professor Phelps, in his study of the Eng- 
lish novel, has gathered together the facts and tells 
the story in very much the following words. At any 
rate, one man, Stevenson, appeared at just the 
moment when readers were either weary or dis- 
gusted with the reigning Sovereign, Realism, and 
who before he died had converted the English- 
speaking world to Romance adorned with graceful, 
exquisite, and shining garments. A couple of years 
before his ascendency, two English critics had per- 
ceived the signs of the coming high tide of roman- 
ticism. Mr. George Saintsbury and Mr. Edmund 
Gosse each independently predicted the coming 
flood. In an essay called "The Limits of Realism 
in Fiction" (1893), Mr. Gosse remarked: "Wherever 
I look I see the novel ripe for another reaction." 
And a bit later the reaction came into full swing. 
In 1894 appeared The Ebb Tide, The Jungle Book, 
Perlycross, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, Under 
The Red Robe, My Lady Rotha, and the story which 
exerted such a prodigious influence, The Prisoner of 
Zenda. 

The demand for some of these books, as Professor 



70 Booth Tarkington 






Phelps further traces, was so sharp and the rapidity 
of their circulation so remarkable, that the sales 
became a matter of interest to critics who were 
watching the public taste; and it was about this 
time that The Bookman began to publish its monthly 
list of best sellers. With romanticism suddenly be- 
come so fashionable naturally many young persons 
wrote their first attempts in fiction in this manner; 
and some novelists of established reputation, un- 
willing to be left adrift, trimmed their sails to the 
fresh breeze. The old masters, though their popu- 
larity decidedly waned, refused to surrender; and 
one, Mr. Howells, protested — in vain — against this 
sudden domination of romance, calling the whole 
thing romantic rot. The strength of the Romantic 
Revival drew men whose natural tastes, inclinations, 
and temperament were toward realism to the pro- 
duction of romances. Stanley Weyman suddenly 
shifted from an obscure Anthony-Trollope-like real- 
ism; produced in rapid succession, The House of the 
Wolf, A Gentleman of France, Under the Red Robe; 
and found himself one of the most famous men in 
the world. When the romantic wave subsided, he 
retired, apparently without (unlike the subject of 
our sketch) another shot in his locker. 

Professor Phelps relates in his book his own ex- 
perience on a Sunday evening in 1894 which illus- 
trates in microcosmic manner the world's change of 






Booth Tarhington 71 



heart from realism to romanticism. He had just 
finished reading Marcella. Then he picked up Under 
the Red Robe. Such a glorious relief from tiresome 
party politics and pharisaical reformers in London, to: 

Marked Cards! 

the lie hotly given and returned, the tables and 
chairs overset, the rush for the dark street, the 
clash of swords, the parry and thrust — we're off! 

Conan Doyle had already got under way in the 
late eighties with Micah Clarke and The White 
Company, and these books came fully into fashion 
in the nineties. Anthony Hope deserted what was 
probably his natural bent expressed in the Dolly 
Dialogues, and followed his romantic extravaganza, 
The Prisoner of Zenda, with Rupert of Henzau. 
The most popular productions of all this great 
vogue, such as Zenda and Under the Red Robe, 
had enormous runs on the boards as sheer melo- 
drama. 

The romantic germ crossed the ocean, and in 
1902, Bliss Perry, then editor of the Atlantic, could 
write of "the present passion for historical novels." 
The characters of many of these costume novels 
talked a jargon of obsolete oaths, in a sentimental 
love story, with a historical royal personage as 
deus ex machina. It mattered not if their historical 
foundation betrayed ignorance, nor if their style was 



72 Booth Tarkington 

crude: scores of such books went like wildfire until 
the next sensation came along. As Professor Phelps 
(whom we are so largely quoting, or paraphrasing) 
points out, an especially representative example of 
the whole class appeared in Charles Major's When 
Knighthood was in Flower, a work distressingly lack- 
ing in distinction, which sold over five hundred 
thousand copies. 

The author, later of books of political, religious, 
and social reform, novels like The Inside of the Cup 
and A Far Country, contributed to the romantic 
storm one of its most soaring rockets, Richard Car- 
vel; and the author of the realistic Honorable Peter 
Sterling wrote Janice Meredith, which conquered the 
public immediately, and like so many of its kind was 
speedily transferred to the stage and thence to 
oblivion. The hue and cry was not less in the 
theatre than between covers; and at the height of 
this fashion a new version of Dumas's immortal 
story was put on the American stage by Mr. Soth- 
ern, and flourished mightily. Other hot favorites 
in fiction of the day were Mary Johnston's To Have 
and To Hold, Dr. Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynne, and 
Maurice Thompson's Alice of Old Vincennes. Mon- 
sieur Beaucaire rode into popular favor on the crest 
of the romantic wave. The great Romantic Revival 
held out for about fifteen years, then spent itself 
as crazes do, and only one or two anachronisms 



Booth Tarkington 73 

among authors, like Jeffery Farnel, continued to 
wear the cape and plume. 

Where are the romances of y ester year? Dead as 
a door nail, most of them. Though indeed some of 
them do continue to survive, in an obscure existence 
like former beaux fallen upon shady days, in the 
cheap reprint editions of past favorites. And a 
very few, like Hugh Wynne, yet wear the dignity of 
enduring character. But, in general, now to run 
over a list of the titles of these one time pampered 
pets of the reading world brings such a smile as it 
does to recall song hits of other days: "Only a Bird 
in a Gilded Cage," "My Sweetheart's the Man in 
the Moon," and "Down Went McGinty to the 
Bottom of the Sea." And it is indeed interesting to 
remark that the briefest, lightest, and slightest in 
effect of all that dashing throng has been among the 
very, very few to retain something like its virgin 
flush of rose. Monsieur Beaucaire the world has not 
so willingly let die. It continues to be kept "in 
stock" at book stores, and sells (I am told) if not in 
quantities, at least right along to-day; and it is 
continually being "drawn" from the shelves of public 
libraries. There is no difficulty about the explana- 
tion: no work of perfect art is ever permitted to 
perish altogether. And, though perhaps a bit flam- 
boyant in manner, I do not know that it is a par- 
ticularly hazardous observation to say to Beaucaire: 



74 Booth Tarhington 

When old age shall this generation waste, 
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 

At any rate, let us not be niggardly of appreciation 
in the presence of a tiny bit of well-nigh flawless 
beauty. Monsieur Beaucaire ought to last (let us 
say) as long as there is a taste for The Master of 
Ballantrae. 

Monsieur Beaucaire has been compared to the art 
of Watteau. And this comparison, an inevitable one 
and a kind of inspiration, is the happiest of the many 
that have been made. It is a comparison which is 
constructive criticism. M. Camille Mauclair in his 
little study, both lyric and penetrating, of Watteau, 
speaks of those celebrated fetes galantes as "tender, 
dazzling, and most deliciously aristocratic." Ex- 
actly so, Beaucaire, that vivid, pastel-like sketch of 
a flashing episode in the life of a "small, fair gentle- 
man," radiant, exquisite of heart, brilliant, auda- 
cious, winningly dignified, a French duke of the 
royal blood at Bath in the eighteenth century; who 
masquerades, for his private purposes, in this re- 
sort of white-satin-sheen fashion first as a "gamblist" 
barber, and then as the Due de Chateaurien, laugh- 
ing in his sleeve at the dull-witted Englishman who, 
incited by the Duke of Winterset's personal animos- 



Booth Tarkington 75 

ity, tries to hunt him down as a laquais; who falls 
under the spell of "gold and snow and the blue sky 
of a lady's eye," the Beauty of Bath, — " bellissima, 
divine, glorieuse!" — and who shows by his sword 
that he is one "born." A tale, or something less 
than a tale, whose only, and complete, excuse for 
its being is the blitheness of its mood, the symmetry 
of its form, the iridescent color of its words, the 
swiftness of its action, and the tingling vitality of it, 
from start to finish; a thing of dainty wit all compact. 
One of the perpetual delights of Monsieur Beau- 
caire is the crispness with which its sparkling and 
rapidly shifting scenes are realized. The reader ac- 
tually sees as clearly as though he had before him a 
painting by the late Howard Pyle, or a drawing by 
Daniel Vierge, the picture given of the chairmen 
swarming in the street at Lady Malbourne's door, 
"where the joyous vulgar fought with muddled foot- 
men and tipsy link-boys for places of vantage whence 
to catch a glimpse of quality and of raiment at its 
utmost. Dawn was in the east, and the guests were 
departing." Or, again, view that night of the " stately 
junket," when "all of Bath that pretended to fashion 
or condition was present at a fete at the house of a 
country gentleman of the neighborhood:" 

There fell a clear September night, when the 
moon was radiant over town and country, over 



76 Booth Tarkingion 

cobbled streets and winding roads. From the fields 
the mists rose slowly, and the air was mild and 
fragrant, while distances were white and full of 
mystery. 

Then it was that the coach took the road with the 
happy Frenchman riding close to that adorable win- 
dow which framed the fairest face in England, a 
dozen gallants riding before, when a wild halloo 
sounded ahead; the horn wound loudly, and, with 
drawn swords flashing in the moon, a party of 
horsemen charged down the highway, their cries 
blasting the night, — and the battle was joined. Or 
see Beau Nash standing "at the door of the rooms, 
smiling blandly upon a dainty throng in the pink of 
its finery and gay furbelows." Best of all, the scene 
in the Pump Room, where Monsieur Beaueaire's 
identity is disclosed by the arrival of his brother 
and the French Ambassador, to the consternation 
of his enemies and still more of the Lady Mary 
Carlisle, who had loved him until she was taught 
to scorn him as a servant, — a scene in which are 
mingled bright charm and subtle pathos. 

He offered his hand to Lady Mary. 
"Mademoiselle is fatigue. Will she honor me?" 
He walked with her to the door, her hand flutter- 
ing faintly in his. From somewhere about the gar- 
ments of one of them a little cloud of faded rose- 



Booth Tarkington 77 

leaves fell, and lay strewn on the floor behind them. 
He opened the door, and the lights shone on a mul- 
titude of eager faces turned toward it. There was 
a great hum of voices, and, over all, the fiddles wove 
a wandering air, a sweet French song of the voyageur. 
He bowed very low, as, with fixed and glistening 
eyes, Lady Mary Carlisle, the Beauty of Bath, 
passed slowly by him and went out of the room. 

Ye Gods! as Mr. Baxter says, that is the air of 
Romance. 

***** 
There used to be (I have ferreted out) an elderly 
gentleman residing in the neighborhood of New 
York City whose keenest pleasure, and one which 
he exercised continually, was recounting the glories 
of existence in Terre Haute, Indiana — as it existed 
in the golden haze of his fond memory. Like that 
other being of sentiment celebrated in a Riley poem, 
it was his proud wont to (in retrospect): 

Boast and strut 

About the streets of Terry Hut. 

And a reflection from this gentleman's rose-tinted 
spectacles was the inception of The Two Vanrevels, 
the story which, in order of publication, next fol- 
lowed Monsieur Beaucaire. For Mr. Tarkington's 
Rouen, Indiana, was Terre Haute, one of the older 
towns of Indiana, which, though it has not made so 



78 Booth Tarkington 

much noise in the world as a "literary center" as 
some other points in the state (Crawfordsville, for 
instance, the "Hoosier Athens," lovingly celebrated 
and oft' by Mr. Nicholson), contained in its earliest 
years families of marked cultivation. Lyman Ab- 
bott began his ministry in Indiana as pastor of the 
Congregational Church at Terre Haute. And the 
town has been the home of numerous distinguished 
politicians. Richard W. Thompson, who became 
Secretary of the Navy in President Hayes' cabinet, 
and who was also a writer of books, and Daniel W. 
Voorhees, the "tall sycamore of the Wabash," long a 
senator in Congress, and acclaimed the greatest 
forensic orator of his day in the Ohio valley, were 
both of Terre Haute. The Two Vanrevels is histori- 
cally accurate in that among Terre Haute's most 
accomplished early citizens there was a distinct 
strain of the Southern States, and, presumably, a 
touch and more of the romantic flavor of Southern 
manners. In later days one of Terre Haute's citi- 
zens most conspicuously in the public eye has been 
a brewer, and in recent years the little city has 
come to be somewhat known as a home of political 
corruption. 

Rouen, it will be remembered, was also only 
"seventy miles away" from Plattville. There it 
was Tom Meredith had his home, to which the con- 
valescent John Harkless drove from the hospital in 



Booth Tarlcington 79 

a victoria "through the pretty streets:" "a capacious 
house in the Western fashion of the Seventies," with, 
in front, on the lawn, a fountain with a leaping play 
of water, and maples and shrubbery everywhere. 
That, however, was in the Nineties. 

"It was long ago in the days when men sighed 
when they fell in love; when people danced by 
candle and lamp, and did dance, too, instead of 
solemnly gliding about; in that mellow time so long 
ago, when the young were romantic and summer 
was roses and wine, old Carewe brought his lovely 
daughter home from the convent to wreck the 
hearts of the youth of Rouen." A reviewer in the 
Athenaeum found in Mr. Tarkington's Rouen of The 
Two Vanrevels — "the leading center of elegance and 
culture in the Ohio valley" — "despite wide differ- 
ences, something of the atmosphere of Cranford or 
of the homes of some of Jane Austen's pleasant 
people." The feminine society wholly in the posses- 
sion of the out-of-the-way English village of Cran- 
ford before the encroachment of railways and penny 
postage, one fears, would have gone into hysterics 
had it lived through the lurid night of old Carewe's 
warehouse fire. And what would those widows and 
spinsters, who spent their time in tea-drinking and 
trivial gossip, and in chasing sunbeams from their 
carpets, who before going to bed peeped beneath 
the white dimity valance or rolled a ball under it, 



80 Booth Tarkington 

to be sure no Iachimo with "great fierce face" lay 
concealed there — what would they have made of 
that town Lothario and Light-o'-Love, romantically 
dissipated Crailey Gray? And Miss Austen, too, 
who ruffles her readers by nothing vehement, doubt- 
less would have been thrown somewhat off her 
center by such a deed of blood occurring in one of 
her novels as the mistaken murder of the beloved 
vagabond gentleman in the new soldier's uniform 
of Tom Vanrevel. 

One sees, however, what the reviewer had in 
mind; and it is just as well that the name of Miss 
Austen has been brought into the matter, as, de- 
spite the wide differences, humorously wide differ- 
ences, between them, it is not difficult to fancy here 
and there in Mr. Tarkington's earlier work, in his 
vivacious transcript of manners, something amus- 
ingly Jane-Austenish about him. The provincial 
material with which he is so familiar and which so 
strongly attracts him by its flavor is very much a 
later-day counterpart of that of Miss Austen's. He, 
too, is fond of finding comedy in the amenities of 
youthful social life, critical amusement in the inti- 
mate contacts of the domestic circle, and the move- 
ments of fate in the play of small things. He has 
something of the same bubble of mind, and beneath 
the surface a like undercurrent of common sense and 
respectable thinking. And like Miss Austen's style, 



Booth Tarkington 81 

his is that of everyday life, to which he has added 
an element of charm. 

Though the setting of The Two Vanrevels is once 
more Mr. Tarkington 's happy hunting ground, In- 
diana, it is an Indiana quite unfelt by the author of 
The Hoosier Schoolmaster or the author of The Old 
Swimming-Hole, and 'Leven More Poems; an Indiana, 
indeed, after the heart of the author of Monsieur 
Beaucaire. In this story Mr. Tarkington essayed 
his single historical romance of Indiana, and sought 
the rose-tinted mist of distance essential to a tale 
of this type by throwing back the time of action a 
couple of generations, to the days just preceding the 
outbreak of the Mexican war; and by peopling it 
with men of old-fashioned courtliness and women 
of gracious manners and soft-voiced charm. The 
author was in love with the age. It was "the 
age of garlands; they wreathed the Muses, the 
Seasons, and their speech, so women wore wreaths 
in their hair"; the age of brocade, ribbons and fur- 
belows; of balls and junketings, carpet dances and 
masquerades; of canes, and bright buttons on men's 
coats, of echoes of the Beau, like Crailey Gray; 
when "polished manners" were the fashion, and 
"hospitality" meant "a house with a side-board 
like a widow's cruse:" "Mr. Bareaud at fifty had 
lived so well that he gave up walking, which did 
not trouble him; but at sixty he gave up dancing, 



82 Booth Tarkington 

which did trouble him." In this novel of high- 
class comedy type there is ever "a scent of flowers 
in the air," or "the air is heavy with roses and 
tremulous with June." It was a pleasant day, and, 
it would seem, a pleasant place to live, that 
Rouen, those many years ago in the Ohio valley. 
Mr. Tarkington, however, sought to recapture 
the first, fine, careless rapture of an old gentle- 
man; and it is his own opinion that he did 
not succeed; his "atmosphere" being neither here 
nor there, but in an old gentleman's roseate 
memory. 

The Two Vanrevels is both a better book and a 
poorer book than The Gentleman from Indiana, 
which in date of composition immediately preceded 
it. The Two Vanrevels, like Monsieur Beaucaire, is 
the kind of thing which depends altogether on tech- 
nical excellence to be anything at all. The Gentle- 
man from Indiana is the kind of book which, like 
that well-known recent affair, William McFee's Cas- 
uals of the Sea, both more of a book and more alto- 
gether formless, can stand by the substance, the 
stuff, that is in it. The plot structure of The Two 
Vanrevels, though slight in frame, is of artistic 
workmanship; the story is marked by a careful 
consideration of the niceties of character; and, as in 
Beaucaire, the author recognizes consistently through- 
out the story the key in which he is pitching his 



Booth Tarkington 83 

story, that of sheer romanticism, which here and 
there flares into melodrama. 

Fault has been found with The Two Vanrevels on 
the score of lack of plausibility. Mark Twain 
(wasn't it?) declared that he knew of but seven 
plots in the world. He was, apparently, six to the 
good of Mr. Tarkington's game. The basis of 
practically every story he has written, down to 
The Turmoil, has been a misunderstanding of 
one kind or another, of identity, of purpose, of 
character. And in repeated instances this misun- 
derstanding has been of the most elementary sort, 
that of mistaken identity. This charge, however, 
really goes no further than to say that, like many 
men of the highest gift, which he has in fair measure, 
imagination, he is curiously feeble in the faculty of 
invention. He is no Poe. In some cases, as in The 
Flirt, ripping as a character study, his efforts at 
invention in the surrounding story are almost child- 
like. Contrary to what very likely we have been 
wont lightly to suppose, in the essence of his talent 
the play is never the thing. The people are the 
thing, and the freshness of the art with which the 
thrice-told tale is told. 

It is not (as has been observed in an earlier criti- 
cism) perhaps likely that Miss Betty Carewe could 
have made the blunder she did in taking Tom Van- 
revel and Crailey Gray each for the other in a town 



84 Booth TarJdngton 

where everyone knew everyone else, where she was 
continually meeting first one of the two men and 
then the other, at all sorts of social functions, talking 
with them, dancing with them, more than liable at 
any moment to hear them addressed by name. In 
Monsieur Beaucaire and in The Gentleman from In- 
diana, as this former criticism noted, the same con- 
trivance appears more natural: the identity of the 
Prince is an easily kept secret because it is shared 
by no one but his loyal servants, — and Beaucaire 
has the further advantage in this of being very 
brief; the identity of the substitute editor of the 
Carlow County Herald is easily concealed from the 
hero because Harkless is flat on his back in a hos- 
pital ward in another town seventy miles distant, — 
and in The Gentleman from Indiana there is the 
further advantage that the secret had to be kept 
throughout only a fraction of the story. The germ 
of The Two Vanrevels is said to have been a story 
of two thousand words written many years before; 
and in expanding it to serve as the excuse for a full- 
length novel the author perhaps strained a device 
which would have served more effectively as the 
sub-structure of a short story. But, after all, The 
Two Vanrevels is exactly the sort of a gift-horse 
which it is perhaps a bit heavy in us to look in the 
mouth. The period of its composition was with the 
author, as in the atmosphere of the story, one of 



Booth Tarhington 85 

June and wine and roses; and Mr. Tarkington had 
probably concluded at the time he wrote the book 
that his "job" was merely to give entertainment, and 
he supplied this, in The Two Vanrevels, with some- 
thing of a tour de force. 

In many ways the book pleasantly suggests the 
air of Congreve, Farquhar, Wycherley, what Elia 
termed the artificial comedy of last century. It in- 
vites the mood of not earrying our fireside concerns 
to the theatre, but of going thither, like our ances- 
tors, to escape from the pressure of reality. Its 
creatures are the fictitious half-believed personages 
of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy); sports 
of a witty fancy, they seem engaged in their proper 
element, idle gallantry. They are not so much of 
Christendom, as (in Lamb's conceit) of the land of 
cuckoldry — the Utopia of gallantry. The curmud- 
geon merchant, ferocious old Carewe, the richest 
man and the best hater in the community, in whose 
opinion, loudly expressed, the law firm of Vanrevel 
and Gray is composed of a knave and a fool — an 
opinion in which he is not the slightest disturbed 
by the fact that the public generally has never made 
up its mind which of the two it loves the more: 
the town model of virtue, Tom Vanrevel, or light- 
hearted, fickle, fascinating and utterly irresponsible 
Crailey Gray; — gambling, murderous old Carewe is 
not at all convincing as a character in real life; but 



86 Booth Tarkington 

he does well enough as a satisfying hobgoblin. On 
the other hand, Mr. Tarkington's artistic failing, his 
great luck with minor characters, again comes to the 
fore in his creation of the enlivening widow, Mrs. 
Tanberry, "who was about sixty, looked forty, and 
at first you might have guessed she weighed nearly 
three hundred, but the lightness of her smile, and 
the actual buoyancy which she somehow imparted 
to her whole dominion lessened that by at least a 
hundred- weight," — Jane Tanberry, "young Janie 
Tanberry," who declared to the belle of Rouen 
"we're the same foolish age, you know." She is 
indeed irresistible, and would seem to be right out 
of some old play like Sheridan's Rivals. 

The town scamp and ne'er-do-well, the too, too 
picturesque Crailey Gray, wit, poet, and scape- 
grace and chief comedian of Rouen, with the "mark" 
upon him described by that one of his lady-loves 
who loved him best, Fanchon Bareaud, as a "look 
of fate," seems to be a sort of angelicized Sydney 
Carton (a character much admired by William Bax- 
ter). In his infinite capacity for flirtation he reminds 
one of Mr. St. Ives, who declared, "When I can't 
please a woman, hang me in my cravat!" If one 
attempts to gather from Mr. Tarkington's various 
heroes a sort of collective statement of the Tark- 
ington hero, one gets — into difficulties. On one 
hand we have a composite portrait of, altogether, a 



Booth Tarhington 87 

somewhat Fieldinglike type of hero. Though they 
are mighty fine fellows, like Tom Jones, they are 
sad dogs, many of Mr. Tarkington's heroes: Crailey 
Gray, William Fentriss, Joe Louden, Robert Russ 
Mellin, Larrabee Harman, and — yes — Penrod Scho- 
field. On the other hand, there are Saint John Hark- 
less, Tom Vanrevel, Bibbs Sheridan, estimable gen- 
tlemen, all. 

Romantically dissipated Crailey Gray (who be- 
longed to a vanished day when John Barleycorn, 
now by the world degraded by the name of booze, 
was a gentleman of fashion, rejoicing in the society of 
the brightest) may seem to have little relation to 
Mr. Harkless; and yet there is the link of the "born 
lover" between them. Mr. Gray has "cared more 
deeply than other men for every lovely thing I ever 
saw," and "I'd be ashamed not to have cared for 
the beauty in all the women I've made love to." 
The Two Vanrevels, however, has the peculiarity of 
having two heroes (samples of both of Mr. Tark- 
ington's brands), the law firm of Gray and Vanrevel; 
and Mr. Tarkington (scratching his head to induce 
clearer recollection) says he "thinks" he had in 
mind some such symbolic idea as that "the two 
Vanrevels," who complemented each other, together 
made one complete man. 

As a swain the Tarkington hero is very — Tark- 
ingtonian. He is bold and dashing in attack, when 



88 Booth Tarkington 

he thinks of the beauty to be won, and faint of heart, 
when he thinks of his own un worthiness. "The 
stupidity of these heroes," wrote Mr. Maurice in 
his Bookman article of a number of years ago, "ap- 
pears the more crass in view of the simple candour 
that is the predominating characteristic of every one 
of his heroines. In fact, it is that personal direct- 
ness that in almost every case is brought into play 
as a last resort. Helen Fisbee, Betty Carewe, and 
Ariel Tabor do not actually propose — in so many 
words. But — Ariel Tabor extends her hands to Joe 
Louden, bidding him take them instead of empty 
gloves; Betty Carewe whispers to the undiscernihg 
Vanrevel that he is the one whom the dying Crailey 
Gray prophesied was to return to complete her life; 
Helen Fisbee, finding that conventional encourage- 
ment is of no avail, resorts to measures still more 
direct." And Sylvia Gray does throw herself out- 
right into the arms of William Fentriss, crying, 
" Then you must just have me!" Mrs. Lindley must 
slyly inspire her son Richard to go to claim Laura 
Madison, already his for the coming. And Bibbs's 
father must bring his Mary Vertress to him. Yet 
the reader is never shocked by the suggestion of 
boldness in these ladies so clearly loved. What else, 
except shaking them, was to be done with wooers so 
humble minded and obtuse? 

The most interesting thing about Crailey Gray, 



Booth Tarkington 89 

however, to one on the trail of Mr. Tarkington, is 
that he was called "peculiar" by the quiet souls of 
Rouen. The "oddity," the " queer " one, the character 
of finer grain, whose actual home is not of the world 
about him, the social "outsider," the finely intelligent 
being whose higher wisdom is held by the community 
to indicate a lack of mental balance, the disinter- 
ested observer of the scene: this is a character dear 
to the heart of Mr. Tarkington. There is a long 
fine of succession: the patriarchal Mr. Fisbee, the 
only inhabitant of Plattville who had an unknown 
past; Crailey Gray, whose poems his law partner 
declared were worth more than all the legal business 
done by the firm; the outcast Joe Louden, and the 
hoyden Ariel Tabor; the impoverished Italian gen- 
tleman, Ansolini; the childlike Oliver Saffren; the 
brilliant, tragic Ray Vilas; the sensitive invalid Bibbs 
Sheridan. And, though so oft repeated as to seem 
a part of a constructive formula, it is a device which, 
in union with his figure of the returned wanderer, 
Mr. Tarkington employs with considerable effect, 
most notably in the case of Bibbs, in obtaining the 
critical perspective, which, it is one of the points 
this survey of him would bring forward, his instinct 
has always sought. 

Conrad, of course, is another who goes at his, 
rather more profound, statement of social values 
from the angle of the outsider, the outcast. But in 



Booth Tarkington 

his somber conception of life as a struggle in which 
man is doomed only to defeat, all of Conrad's bril- 
liant and poignant beings are dreamers who go to 
smash upon the rocks of human weakness and stu- 
pidity. Most of Mr. Tarkington's earlier stories 
were cast in the airy optimistic traditions of the 
popular stage, where virtue is bound to triumph over 
evil, and heartily applauded courage by daring all 
"wins through;" but the years have very strikingly 
deepened his art, and into his later books has come 
(with little or no recognition by the reviewers) a 
good deal of the more pondering, Conrad note. Vilas 
is destroyed by the selfish heartlessness of a vain 
and vulgar woman, a kind of stupidity; and over 
Bibbs his enemy, the god of Bigness, did finally 
prevail. 

Ancient Uncle Xenophon, rheumatic, rusty of 
joint, bent upon a hickory stick, who might have 
known the prophets, who wore that hoary look of 
unearthly wisdom many decades of superstitious ex- 
perience sometimes give to members of his race, his 
face — so tortured with wrinkles that it might have 
been made of innumerable black threads woven to- 
gether — a living mask of the mystery of his blood; 
— Uncle Zen, who told as one having authority 
where the injured John Harkless lay, was an awe- 
some figure of a very genuine old negro of a type; 
but it is in The Two Vanrevels that Mr. Tarkington's 



Booth Tarkington 91 

extraordinary gift for catching the heart of the char- 
acter of the Afro-American began apparently to find 
itself. The Carewes' old house-servant, Old Nelson, 
humming an old "spiritual," "Chain de Lion Down," 
and the cook, vain Mamie, should have honorable 
mention in Mr. Tarkington's extensive gallery of 
darkey portraits by an inspired hand. 

Mr. Tarkington to-day declares, with the "look" of 
a man who is unpleasantly reminded of a former 
malady, that he "can no longer read Stevenson." 
In the light of the evolution of his feeling for style 
The Two Vanrevels has particular interest; nowhere 
else in his work is there so much a Stevensonian con- 
sciousness of the "gesture" of style, nowhere so 
much, as Stevenson put it, the "love of lovely 
words." Nothing to-day, apparently, so much gives 
Mr. Tarkington the horrors as the idea of the "lit- 
erary." He does not want to be "caught," he de- 
clares, writing "prose." Some literary editor in New 
York told him that some of the passages in The 
Turmoil, in particular (I think) the cemetery scene, 
were noble English prose, worthy, I suppose, of the 
author of Urn Burial. "He liked them," says Mr. 
Tarkington, with a wry face, as though, if he knew 
just how, he would cut those passages out. In The 
Two Vanrevels there are even slight affectations of 
speech, as, once, the word "instanter," and a fre- 
quent repetition of the stylistic use of "never," as in 






92 Booth Tarkington 

"danced she never so hard and late," and "though 
never so slightly"; though of course this blend of 
St. Ives and Godey's Magazine kind of style is quite 
proper to the story. And throughout The Two 
Vanrevels there are (whether or not the author now 
likes them) quite charming bits of writing. It is a 
charming touch, Miss Betty's hurrying to a seat by 
Mrs. Tanberry, and "nestling to her like a young 
sapling on a hillside." The landscape painting is 
done with a lighter brush and a thinner pigment 
than in The Gentleman from Indiana: 

Noon found Tom far out on the National Road, 
creaking along over the yellow dust in a light wagon, 
between bordering forests that smelt spicily of wet 
underbrush and May-apples; and, here and there, 
when they would emerge from the woods to cleared 
fields, liberally outlined by long snake-fences of black 
walnut, the steady, jog- trotting old horse lifted his 
head and looked interested in the world, but Tom 
never did either. 

An earlier draught of The Gentleman from In- 
diana, it is told, a tale of which forty thousand 
words were written about a young college graduate 
who became a country editor in an Indiana town 
very much like the Plattville of the later novel, came 
to an abrupt end when the hero was in the middle 
of a walk, the author being unable to carry him a 
step further. A suspicion hangs in the air of The 



Booth Tarkington 93 

Two Vanrevels that there was some fumbling in 
winding up that story: and the author acknowledges 
that there he was "stuck" again. He went away to 
attend to the production of a play, and upon his 
return it was "wonderful" that he managed to 
carry off the thing at all. Maybe it was the heroic 
effort required to end the story which led to the 
humorous effect of George-Cohaning at the end, 
where "the flag goes marching by," — while the au- 
dience (as it is required by patriotism to do) should 
arise and cheer. Following The Two Vanrevels ap- 
peared the least understood of Mr. Tarkington's 

seldom esoteric stories. 

* * * * * 

It is, among other things, the business of the 
critic to reconcile the irreconcilable. Those numerous 
things in Mr. Tarkington which, seen out of their 
natural relation, seem inexplicable in their origin 
become clear enough when correlated with other 
things. A reader (I've heard of such) acquainted 
with Mr. Tarkington only through his later books 
who should stumble upon Cherry might well be 
flabbergasted. Cherry, however, is clearly the direct 
offspring of Mr. Tarkington's John-a-Dreams period. 

It is a prose caricature by an exquisite in letters — 
and a poet. Austin Dobson might have done it in a 
triple roundel, or the late Andrew Lang in a ballade. 
It is a titbit of belles-lettres, a bagatelle for the 



94 Booth Tarkington 



tive 



epicure, a "relish" to tickle the delicate, sensitive 
palate; an olive for the hightly cultivated taste; to 
be compared to a drawing and verse by the incom- 
parable Oliver Herford, or to be matched, say, in 
the "works" of the matchless Max Beerbohm. It 
is this for the reader — the connoisseur; for the au- 
thor it was a little drill in his rigorous apprenticeship 
to becoming a writer that can write. 

Though Cherry did not appear in book form until 
1903, it was written before either The Gentleman 
from Indiana or Monsieur Beaucaire; and the amaz- 
ing thing about it is — as the term "caviare to the 
general" certainly fits Cherry to a T — that it was 
taken, as a two part serial, by a popular magazine 
when its author was practically unknown. I should 
say that there are just about a dozen, perhaps six, 
people in the United States who would find their 
heart's delight in precisely this kind of thing. The 
remarkable editor who took Cherry on its merits as 
a waggish farce, a whimsical tale with a consum- 
mately polished surface like a Vermeer, later prob- 
ably regarded it in the light of an unhappy selection 
— as an editorial faux pas, perhaps — until the suc- 
cess of the author's other books brought it quickly 
out of its obscurity in manuscript or galley-form, 
and led to swift publication with a greatly aug- 
mented value. 

Cherry is extraordinary among Mr. Tarkington's 



Booth Tarkington 95 

books in that the story is laid in New Jersey, in the 
days preceding the American Revolution. This 
"heroic tale of the days when Commencement came 
in September" is appropriately dedicated to the 
class of 1893 at Nassau Hall, concerning which 
dedication the New York Sun remarked doubtfully 
that it hoped the class would appreciate the tribute. 
To attempt to state the plot (as some critics have 
done), and thus to sever it from the envelope of 
atmosphere which is its life, would indeed be to 
break a butterfly on the wheel, — and the story 
would appear the extreme of mediocrity. To say, as 
has been said, that the story "turns on a practical 
joke," would be equally — Mr. Sudgeberryish. The 
story "turns" on its high spirits, its sportive gayety, 
its delicious drollery. 

It may be questioned whether the "exaggerated 
pedantry" of Mr. Sudgeberry, who at the age of 
nineteen is finishing his third year of study at Nas- 
sau Hall, has not been a bit exaggerated by numer- 
ous critics of the story. Mr. Sudgeberry's pedantry 
of course would be quite impossible in our "red 
blood" day, sufficiently (in all conscience) emanci- 
pated from the fetish of "scholarship" and impa- 
tient enough of mental "improvement" as a moral 
virtue. But at the period when Mr. Sudgeberry 
flourished was not Johnsonian "learning" the fashion 
among callow youth? In his day, even so estimable 



96 Booth Tarkington 






a gentleman as John Milton was capable right along 
of such pomposity as this, in a letter to a friend: 

I who certainly have not merely wetted the tip of 
my lips in the stream of these (the classical) lan- 
guages, but in proportion to my years have swallowed 
the most copious draughts, can yet sometimes retire 
with avidity and delight to feast on Dante, Petrarch, 
and many others; nor has Athens itself been able to 
confine me to the transparent waves of its Ilissus, 
nor ancient Rome to the banks of its Tiber, so as to 
prevent my visiting with delight the streams of the 
Arno and the hills of Faesolae. 

Mr. Sudgeberry could not go Mr. Milton much 
better than that. And as for the "intolerable prig- 
gishness" and the "incredible self-satisfaction," as 
these traits have been called, of Mr. Sudgeberry, 
why, the conscious righteousness of a character such 
as (the revered) Colonel Esmond, also a narrator 
in the first person, is capable of ridicule; and it may 
be that Mr. Tarkington had in mind the intention 
of writing a blithe parody, such as Fielding's Pamela, 
At any rate, the "unbelievably" thick-headed Mr. 
Sudgeberry (as some readers have found him) is a 
prig in the Grand Manner. He tells his unfortunate 
love story with the unconscious satisfaction of the 
prig type, feeling certain of his success with the 
heartless Sylvia, who is laughing at him all along, 
and using him for the purposes of advance with her 



Booth Tarkington 97 

other young man. And the boisterous adventure 
which brings the affair to an end is an excellent bit 
of fun, well contrived, and told with great vivacity 
and a delicate art which makes the reader feel a 
dash of sympathy for the dupe. 

The history of Cherry subsequent to its long with- 
held publication is entertaining, and is interesting, 
too, as a study in the psychology of the American 
reading public. The story, of course, is one of a kind 
more readily comprehended by the English taste, 
and, indeed, was at once much more appreciatively 
reviewed in the English papers than in our own. 
While there may be (for all I know) some so tem- 
peramentally disposed that they have placed Cherry 
on their shelves as a companion piece to Love in 
Olde Cloathes and next to A Sentimental Journey, 
the book has certainly puzzled and irritated a great 
many readers. The author received numerous let- 
ters from troubled souls saying they would never 
again read a book of his. And, apparently, Mr. 
Tarkington has had so "rubbed in" a notion of the 
incommunicability of the idea he sought to express 
in the little story that he now can comprehend only 
with difficulty that anyone "gets" it; as he solemnly 
explained to the present writer, and at tedious length, 
that the sore distressed Mr. Gray, and all the rest, 
were only "guying" Mr. Sudgeberry. "Guying 
him!" Mr. Tarkington shouted at me, as though 



98 Booth Tarhington 

convinced that something like physical force was 
required to get the point into my head. 

I recently re-read a copy of Cherry from a public 
library. A former reader of this volume had em- 
phatically expressed himself in pencil on the title 
page; he gave his opinion of the book as "N. G." 
Still another reader of this same copy voiced his 
feelings at the end; under the printed word "Finis" 
he had inscribed his hearty comment: "nuff!" The 
great misfortune of the author of Cherry was that 
he exercised unusual gifts as an ironist. "Thou 
shalt not commit irony," this, Mr. Edmund Gosse, 
writing somewhere on Anatole France, declares is 
the first commandment of the English-speaking pub- 
he for a writer. A third annotator ('pon my word 
'tis so) of this same copy of Cherry, by her implied 
admiration for moral sentiments presumably a lady, 
was the most delightful of all. It is unfortunate 
that Mr. Sudgeberry did not know her; he would 
have made vastly more of a hit with her than he 
did with "Cherry," as wherever he becomes most 
offensively ponderous, and egotistical he most im- 
pressed her. This charming lady, evidently utterly 
mistaking the author's sly-— too sly — humor for the 
earnest expression of his own deepest convictions, 
had underscored such of Mr. Sudgeberry's observa- 
tions as, "I have often remarked that those who 
most emphatically impress upon others the neces- 



Booth Tarhington 99 

sity for promptitude are most apt themselves to be 
dilatory," and "Let it never be denied that true 
learning commands respect even among the most 
ribald minds: for I was listened to with the most 
flattering attention." The relish with which this 
lady, typical perhaps of many literal readers, fol- 
lowed the comedy may be gathered from her under- 
lining Mr. Sudgeberry's smug reflection as to (as it 
appeared to him) the course of his amours in the 
heart of the fair Miss Gray: "Ah, how wonder- 
fully, little by little, do the seeds of affection 
grow!" 

In view of Mr. Tarkington's mature development 
it is curious indeed to contemplate the talent dis- 
played in Cherry, the earliest written of his books. 
The talent is fine enough; the trouble with it pre- 
cisely is that it is that fine kind which does not 
thrive in this stolid world. Cherry is a piece of vir- 
tuosity. There is about it an implication of the 
dilettante. Certainly it does not in the least reveal 
any capacity for reading the great public heart; 
Mr. Tarkington learned first how to write well, and 
then to be a professional writer, one of the most 
practical and expert now going. And it would be 
hard to find in this bouquet any foreshadowing of 
the robust intellectual energy of the study of char- 
acter in The Flirt, or of the pounding satire of The 
Turmoil, or anything of the temper, the startling 



100 Booth Tarkington 

ferocity, of the book which in order of publication 
immediately followed it. 

Freakish kind of thing altogether, probably diffi- 
cult to match in the story of publishing, that Cherry 
should have been followed by such a book by the 

same hand as In the Arena. 

* * * * * 

An earlier commentator remarks that Mr. Tark- 
ington "has an imperishable faith in the innate 
goodness of the human heart," and this (now le- 
gendary) imperishable faith of his, it has often in 
effect been intimated, "gives to the people of his 
fancy a certain whole-souled quality that makes 
them lovable even while we feel that they are a little 
bit too good to be true." Immortal writers have 
been turned from relentless naturalism, and been 
betrayed, by a generous heart. The infinite tender- 
ness of Fielding was mightier, in Amelia, than the 
logic of art. The strong vein of kindly sentiment 
in Mr. Tarkington, throughout his work, his most 
ardent admirer could not deny. And the pervasion 
of much of his work by an excess of this quality has, 
indeed, obscured the possibility of considering him 
as a "novelist of ideas." In any consideration of his 
development, Mr. Tarkington's next book, passed 
over by some with brief mention as "in no way dis- 
tinctive," demands (looking back from the present) 
very much more attention than has been given it 






Booth Tarkington 101 

by any critic. One thing about it which even at the 
time of its publication should have caused one to 
be knocked over by a feather is that there are no 
"heroes" in any of the six stories in it, unless we 
except the last. 

For a year or two after writing The Two Vanrevels 
Mr. Tarkington's activities were attracted to the 
political field, and by taking a seat in the Indiana 
legislature he performed what many of his admirers 
have regarded as one of the great impractical jokes 
of his life. The political campaigning into which he 
plunged with boyish zest was a "find" for the news- 
paper paragraphers of the day. The " actor-acrobat ' ' 
joke, the gorgeous waistcoat story, the "doughnut 
story," the tale of electioneering in a piano factory, 
and all the other joyous yarns, now hoary bromi- 
dioms, it is well to leave in the limbo which shelters 
them. Mr. Tarkington's political speeches were de- 
clared to have been a keen delight to his intimates. 
After his first speech, it has been said, the committee 
gathered about him with such encouraging expres- 
sions as, "Well, you tried, anyway." At any rate, 
it seems quite clear that the college orator was not a 
Hector in politics: our old friend Mr. "John-a- 
Dr earns" relates that the literary candidate ad- 
dressed a gathering of colored citizens in a colored 
church, and after he had talked four minutes two 
brethren were sound asleep. He is said to have ad- 



102 Booth Tarkington 

mitted to a friend that perhaps he was a little im- 
practical in going to Irish and "South-Side" gather- 
ings in his automobile. It is pertinent here to note 
that in this much of a glimpse of him in his cam- 
paigning he appears, as in his writings, a remarkably 
democratic aristocrat; on one side a patrician of the 
Mr. Galsworthy pattern, and, on the other, as much 
of a "good mixer," with his ear just as close to the 
ground, as his onetime political colleague, Samuel 
Lewis Shank (likewise not unknown to fame), auc- 
tioneer, erstwhile Mayor of Indianapolis, pioneer ad- 
vocate of municipal markets, and, later, vaudeville 
performer. 

If Mr. Tarkington was a "kid glove candidate," he 
seems (by his political testament) to have been one 
that, like his Boss Gorgett, played the game as he 
found it; and his familiarity with the details of the 
campaign of which he was a part, one admirer has 
euphuistically said, included a knowledge of "what 
ever' nigger got." Mr. Tarkington was elected as a 
Republican, but soon became an insurgent. The 
two points of his career as a law-maker which I 
myself recall were his motion, shortly after his ar- 
rival in the legislative body, to have the time of 
meeting changed to one hour later in the morning, 
and his defense, against strong opposition by an 
ultra "respectable" class, of a bill providing for Sun- 
day base-ball. Mr. Tarkington's prime services as a 



Booth Tarhington 103 

statesman, and they cannot be said to be mild, were 
rendered obliquely, in the way of criticism. His re- 
action to practical politics, of course, was a reaction 
very natural in a highly-keyed young man sud- 
denly confronted, probably for the first time, with 
an array of the ugly and sordid facts of life; and it 
brought forth in him qualities heretofore latent, and 
totally unsuspected, and into which he has grown 
into most power. 

Critics have had Mr. Tarkington fixed as a ro- 
manticist, and critics have had him fixed as a real- 
ist; but the gods privily had it fixed that he was to 
be something more uncommon. The author of In 
the Arena would change manners; he would portray 
them, that men by seeing them would learn their 
evil or ridiculousness — in short, he definitely revealed 
himself as a satirist — a chafer under existing condi- 
tions, — a critic. June, and wine, and roses, and belle- 
tristic grace, and the he's-a-jolly-good-fellow-Glee- 
Club air have suddenly quite gone by the board in 
In the Arena, and in their stead appears an appari- 
tion wonderful to see over Mr. Tarkington's way, a 
Carlylesque indignation and vehemence. The Mr. 
Tarkington of In the Arena is the Mr. Tarkington 
heading toward the Mr. Tarkington of The Turmoil. 
There is a good deal of the same fiery energy, the 
same kind of rip-roaring earnestness^ the same moral 
intensity in the sharp, smashing style, the same 






104 Booth Tarhington 

mordant wit. Mr. Brownell says of Lowell's wit 
that Lowell possessed too little malice to be dis- 
tinctly penetrating. And in this stinging quality, 
which entered into' Mr. Tarkington's wit in his 
political sketches, he is distinguished to-day be- 
yond any American writer of fiction that I can 
think of. 

When the fruits of Mr. Tarkington's political ob- 
servation were appearing in magazine publication, I 
have heard, Mr. Roosevelt, then President, sent for 
the author to come to Washington, and throughout 
luncheon, before a number of other guests, scolded 
him for putting forth matter which Mr. Roosevelt 
felt had a tendency "to keep decent men out of 
politics"; though when the book was published, I 
understand, Mr. Roosevelt admitted that it was 
"good stuff." Mr. Tarkington himself sets consider- 
able store by In the Arena; it is the only early book 
of his, the only one before Beauty and the Jacobin, 
which, he affirms, he "could stand to re-read." The 
reviewers who felt that "the author's estimate of the 
situation was a pretty true one" were right enough, 
as, even in the most startling instances, the basis of 
his material, he acknowledges, was fact. The . ghastly 
story, "The Aliens," in which a gang of Italians who 
could not be trusted to vote crooked were infected 
with smallpox by the policy ticket device of a ward 
politician was built upon an idea which the author 



Booth Tarhington 105 

encountered revolving in the brain of a perfectly 
live politician. 

In the Arena has this peculiarity: a number of the 
reviewers spoke of the "wide divergence of merit " 
of the stories it contains; and each selected a fav- 
orite of his own as the best. The five stories which 
deal with the psychology of politics, while the under- 
lying attitude of the author — that of the cynical 
humorist — is the same in all, exhibit a wide diver- 
gence in character, display a talent of various notes. 
"Mrs. Protheroe," the story of a ravishing lady 
lobbyist of infinite resource and sagacity, whose 
wiles and fascinations exerted in the interest of 
renting her base-ball ground on Sunday, were the 
undoing of Senator Alonzo Rawson from Stackpole, 
"chairman, ma'am, of the Committee on drains and 
dikes," a raw-boned, half -educated, confident and in- 
tensely earnest young man, "who had, by years of 
endeavor, succeeded in moulding his features to pre- 
sent an aspect of stern and thoughtful majesty when- 
ever he * spoke,'" and who nightly addressed his 
Maker (in the loud voice of one accustomed to talk- 
ing across wide out-of-door spaces) for guidance, — 
this is a story in which the author reflects his per- 
ception of a sordid truth by means of a highly 
finished kind of farce. While "The Aliens," in which 
the happy, tender love of Pietro Tobigli, that gay 
young chestnut vender, he of the radiant smiles, and 



106 Booth Tarkington 

Bertha, rosy waitress in the little German restaurant, 
meets destruction by the hideous schemes, for " votin' 
seven Dagoes," of Mr. Frank Pixley, Republican 
precinct committee-man, "a pock-marked, damp- 
looking, soiled little fungus of a man," who "had 
attained to his office because, in the dirtiest precinct 
of the wickedest ward in the city, he had, through 
the operation of a befitting ingenuity, forced a 
recognition of his leadership," — this is an exercise in 
"grimness" which, coming from the Mr. Tarkington 
of that time, is well-nigh terrific. The Zolaesque 
Mr. Tarkington certainly did a very thorough job of it 
in "The Aliens"; he had several chances, on the way, 
to lighten the blackness of his ending; but, having 
put his hand to this particular plow, he would not 
turn aside from the worst. 

In turning over in one's mind the stories of this 
volume one is fairly staggered by the Schopenhauer- 
like pessimism which is the upshot of the whole 
thing. In every case, save one, the tragic failure re- 
sults directly from a very earnest desire on the part 
of someone to do "right." It is the over-zealous 
reforming impulse of the theoretical politician, Far- 
well Knowles, editorial writer on the Herald, which 
throws him; it is Toby Tobigli's unshakable belief in 
the holiness of the Republican cause which is his 
death; Uncle Billy Rollison, whose reputation for 
honesty is the apple of his eye, is undone by his love 



Booth Tarkington 107 

for his son; Senator Rawson is persuaded to disaster 
by his simple belief that great beauty is great good- 
ness; and Melville Bickner kills himself by unselfish 
labor. Mr. Tarkington's extraordinary burst of pes- 
simism, however, is of a peculiar warm-hearted kind. 
It is quite without the cold cynicism of the man de- 
tached from his species who merely notes how des- 
tinies are controlled by a push in the dark. And it is 
equally devoid of the contempt for the lowly ex- 
pressed in, for instance, such a pessimistic novel as 
George Moore's Esther Waters. While in "The 
Aliens" the author perceives, with revolt at the fact, 
the futility of virtue, as ever he sees and cherishes 
the virtue itself as a thing bright and beautiful. And 
his tragedy gets its poignancy from its striking con- 
trast with the interwoven tenderness and humor. 
The author's "imperishable" compassion for the frail- 
ties of human nature finds an excellent vehicle of 
expression in "The Need of Money" — the story of 
how it happened, through the cruel machinations of 
politics, that Uncle Billy Rollison, a life-long Demo- 
crat and "a man as honest as the day is long," who 
far back in his corner sat through the dragging rou- 
tine of the legislative session wondering what most 
of it meant, voted, because of the difficulties of his 
son Henry, to kill a party measure and was in con- 
sequence "read out of his party." 
Mr. Tarkington's new-found gift, however, his 



108 Booth Tarkington 

malice, perhaps bites deepest in "Hector"; that 
ringing, stinging sketch of a certain kind of tem- 
perament which goes very far in politics thanks to 
its sheer egoism disguised by a talent for moral 
platitudes. "Hector" is a companion picture to 
The Flirt In In the Arena the writer of exceedingly 
popular though artistically somewhat wobbly-con- 
structed novels made his debut as a "crack" tech- 
nician in the short story form according to the canons 
of the treatises. And In the Arena, for all its force 
and feeling, is notable among Mr. Tarkington's early 
realistic books for his grasp of the literary virtue of 
restraint. 

* * * * * 

One of the outstanding popular successes of its 
season in 1905 was The Conquest of Canaan. The 
reviewers, beguiled perhaps by the magnetic figure 
of the author, amiably agreed in general that the 
book deserved all the prosperity it enjoyed. Mr. 
Tarkington himself to-day doesn't like the book, he 
says; and the "face" he makes at mention of it 
certainly indicates a strong distaste. Judge Pike he 
denounces as "bad." He was "introduced for the 
sake of the plot — one shouldn't have a plot — it's 
ruinous — a story should grow out of its characters." 
Such is the artistic creed of the present past master 
of plot novels. Or, if Mr. Tarkington was never a 
"master" of the plot (and, as we see, his gift was 



Booth Tarhington 109 

always for better things), for long the lure of the 
plot mastered him. 

That The Conquest of Canaan is a grand hurrah of 
"melodrama," no one can be tempted to dispute; 
though it is a kind of melodrama which Mr. Tark- 
ington made peculiarly a fine art of his own in fic- 
tion: the "refined melodrama" of Broadway, not the 
coarse and vulgar brand of Third Avenue and the 
historic old Bowery. Men of literary genius can be 
found who were not frightened of melodrama. What 
else, except literature, is Treasure Island? And the 
designation, melodrama, no longer bears the slurring 
connotation it once did. Some distinguished ex- 
ponents and critics of the stage have gone on record 
as asserting that in the near future all drama will 
be melodrama. The word, in fact, has acquired 
a definite respectability, though, indeed, its pre- 
cise significance be remarkably vague. Melodrama, 
we know, once meant a play with songs inter- 
spersed. 

The Conquest of Canaan, at any rate, is distinctly 
a drama of situation, of environment on the one 
hand and of plot on the other. Though no one could 
say that there is not real character 1 — that there are 
not real characters — in the book. The trouble with 
the plot is that it is such a cheap one. And the 
trouble with the characters is that by far the most 
telling ones, simply as characters, are quite subor- 



110 Booth Tarkington 

dinate and unessential, merely a part of the very 
colorful local color. 

Brekeke-kesh, koash, koash, 

Shall the Choral Quiristers of the Marsh 

Be censured and rejected as hoarse and harsh; 

And their Chromatic essays ( 

Deprived of praise? 

Mr. Tarkington's great stroke of pure art in The 
Conquest of Canaan is his chorus of the Aristophanic 
comedy, which, comically enough, is far the best, 
the purest, of his comedy. Even the harshest critic 
of the book, Mr. Tarkington himself, admits that 
they are lovely: they of "the Forum," the conclave 
at the wide windows, or who in summer held against 
all comers the cane-seated chairs before the "Na- 
tional House" (which commanded the gates of the 
city), the wise men, the aged men, the hoary men, 
the town fathers, the sages, the patriarchs, the 
brethren, whose breath was "argument"; and whose 
very names are a joy — Eskew Arp, Colonel Flit- 
croft, Squire Buckalew, and the rest. 

The humorously sardonic Mr. Arp, obsessed by 
his malevolent conception of "an ornery world-full," 
yet whose heart deep down is as soft as that of My 
Uncle Toby, is a not altogether unworthy — distant 
— cousin to that sublime company of crack-brains 
forever celebrated by "poor Yorick" in Tristram 



Booth Tarkington 111 

Shandy. And Eskew's last "argument" to the con- 
clave seems like some tender travesty of Colonel 
Newcome's adsum in the presence of his Master. 

The first chapter of The Conquest of Canaan 
strongly suggests the delightful realistic comedy of 
Mr. Ho wells; and in its more sober moments 
throughout the book reminds one of Mr. Howells' 
genre pictures. For in its stage setting, The Con- 
quest of Canaan is, like The Gentleman from Indiana 
(though perhaps more shrewd and zestful in this), a 
realistic study of manners in a typical American 
town, an authentic human document, and so on. 
The author's unrestrained exuberance of spirits in 
creative fancy and his close observation in detailed 
description are curiously interwoven. One of the 
most fantastic scenes in the story, for instance, one 
where the author's Gargantuan humor, like joy at 
Beaver Beach, reigns literally unconfined, the Sun- 
day procession of Joe and Ariel, which threatens with 
"petrifaction" the "church-comers," is set in an 
Anthony-Trollope-like' (or perhaps, in its sprightli- 
ness, a Jane-Austen-like) picture of the rites of the 
Canaanite Sabbath. The setting of The Conquest of 
Canaan, indeed, has everywhere the ring of com- 
plete fidelity. 

There are several things about this early story 
which take on an interest peculiar to a study of the 
author's whole work. We get, for one thing, the 



112 Booth Tarkington 

first whiff of the later coming into full flower of Mr. 
Tarkington's literally world-famous juvenile society. 
The tall gentleman in his nineteenth year, Mr. Ban- 
try, familiarly known to the conclave as Fanny 
Louden 's boy, wearer of strange and brilliant gar- 
ments, suggestive to the Forum of a "patent-medicine 
troupe," smoker of (what Mr. Arp called) the "cig- 
areet," he of the yellow banjo case, the bone-handled 
walking-stick, and the man-of-the-world gait new at 
that time to Canaan, — Mr. Bantry may now be 
viewed as a prophetic figure, harbinger of William 
Baxter. He, however, like everybody else in The 
Conquest of Canaan, straightway falls rather vio- 
lently into the plot, and ceases to be quite human, 
shortly after his triumphal return from college to 
the humble town which he had honored with his 
birth. His vivid early presence, however, indicates 
that what might be called the Young Adam was al- 
ways strong in this author. 

Another figure in The Conquest of Canaan fraught 
with tidings of future characters of greatness is 
Spec, as he was called for short, Respectability, his 
full name, Joe Louden's yellow dog. It is instruc- 
tive to note the character of Spec, to remark his 
kinship with Duke, lowly confrere of Penrod, and, 
too, with Clematis, property of Genesis in Seventeen. 
Spec was "a small, worn, light-brown scrub-brush of 
a dog, so cosmopolitan in ancestry that his species 



Booth Tarkington 113 

was as undeterminable as the cast-iron dogs of the 
Pike Mansion." And these dogs of the Pike Man- 
sion, which were honored by coats of black paint and 
shellac, "were of no distinguishable species or breed, 
yet they were unmistakably dogs; the dullest must 
have recognized them as such at a glance, which 
was, perhaps, enough." Spec, too, was a victim of the 
inexorable plot of The Conquest of Canaan, with most 
disastrous consequences to his bodily structure. It 
is very interesting, too, to observe that Spec's func- 
tion, as the innocent object of surcharged wrath 
which must find some outlet, is the same as that of 
that "lami<M" Moor in The Turmoil. 

Again in The Conquest of Canaan Mr. Tarkington 
is the moralist. Though some reviewers read a 
strange "lesson" into the book: that it taught that 
all respectable people are narrow-minded and dis- 
honest, and that all the really desirable virtues are 
to be found in the dissolute and disruptable. The 
theme of the story, briefly stated, is simply the diffi- 
culty (in this Puritanically Canaan-like world) of 
living down a bad reputation after it has once been 
firmly established. Joe, the scalawag of Canaan, an 
outcast (as Mr. Arp put it) "as black as a preacher's 
shoes on Sunday," is — a pronounced instance of 
Mr. Tarkington's cherished type, the character in 
maladjustment with his environment — seen with a 
more intelligent and understanding eye than that of 



114 Booth Tarhington 

Canaan. Mr. Tarkington is always all for the under 
dog. And by means of Joe's sympathy with the 
society into which he is thrust, the riffraff of the 
riffraff, the "boys and girls" (as the fatherly man- 
ager of that establishment called them) of the dis- 
ruptable Beaver Beach, the author exercises what, 
in works more seriously regarded, some critics speak 
of as a "Russian compassion." Such parts of Mr. 
Tarkington's story as constitute a brief for the de- 
spised of the world clearly escape (what "Russian 
compassion" does not always do) sentimentality; 
and are written with manly good humor, strength 
and dignity. Though perhaps, as style, they are a 
bit too eloquent. 

A figure very significant too in the light of the 
later workings of Mr. Tarkington's mind is the low- 
life lady of Canaan, the tawdry and rouged Claudine, 
who so hated "to have gen'lemen quarrelling" over 
her, especially her husband, Mr. Fear. The char- 
acter of Mrs. Fear is perceived with something con- 
siderably more than, as first appears, the eye of the 
rollicking humorist. The story's hero, heroine and 
villain are at bottom the old familiar trio of melo- 
drama; and it is in keeping that their typical quali- 
ties should be superlative. As serious fiction the 
story falls down, of course, in that the thrilling 
situations in which it abounds involve coincidences 
that strain the reader's imagination, and that hardly 



Booth TarkingUm 115 

one of these situations grows naturally and logically 
out of the characters involved. The tragedy which 
Mrs. Fear precipitates, however, is quite the psycho- 
logical result of the Mrs. Fear nature, and the symp- 
toms of the malady which is Claudine's character 
are recorded by a Mr. Tarkington curiously omitted 
from the Tarkington legend. Mr. Tarkington's rec- 
ognition of the fact of Mrs. Fear's being in the world 
repeats a bit of the pessimism of In the Arena. But 
there is a point that concerns us a little more than 
that in this little sketch of a sinister nature. The 
touch of the scientist in the blend of things in Mr. 
Tarkington's mature equipment has had conspic- 
uously little recognition. Claudine is the earliest 
expression of Mr. Tarkington's increasing tendency 
to pathological interest in the type of the dangerous 
woman. 

There is another scientific touch to The Conquest 
of Canaan which is very curious indeed, and very 
expressive of the soundness of Mr. Tarkington's 
methods as an artist, when not betrayed by the 
germ of melodrama in his blood. This is the au- 
thor's building a love scene of much charm, which 
rises even to heights of poetic feeling, the tryst of 
Joe and Ariel "across the Main Street bridge at 
noon," upon the phenomenon which students of al- 
coholism term disassociation of personality. Mr. 
Tarkington's first drunkard, Mr. Wilkerson, moving 



116 Booth Tarkington 

about the stage like Mrs. Gamp, was perhaps a bit ou 
the order of the humorous stage drunkard. But never 
in any other instances are Mr. Tarkington's drunk- 
ards figures in whom intoxication is merely artisti- 
cally effective for the occasion; they are nervous 
cases; the roots of their condition may be discerned 
extending back into the circumstances of their lives. 
They are all, Mr. Fisbee, Joe Lane, Joe Louden, 
Crailey Gray, Larrabee Harman, Uncle Billy Rollin- 
son, Ray Vilas, Roscoe Sheridan, well understood 
alcoholics, each representative of one of the many 
varieties of the temperament. 

Perhaps the truest and cleverest bit of writing in 
The Conquest of Canaan is a scene which is an earnest 
of Mr. Tarkington's peculiar power, later so happily 
cultivated, of depicting the social tortures suffered 
by the adolescent: the scene of the last dancing party 
to which Ariel goes, before (in good, old melodrama- 
tic fashion) she "falls heiress" and goes to Paris to 
"learn to dress"; and this chapter of utter frustration 
and humiliation is a fine and tender touch. 

From a point shortly after the former hoyden, 
and "outsider," Ariel returns from Europe a vision of 
loveliness and fashion and " all cultured up," as Eskew 
put it, to wreck havoc with the male population of 
Canaan, and when Joe takes up his fight against the 
great boog-a-boo, Judge Pike, Canaan's millionaire 
and dictator, the story becomes melodrama frank 



Booth Tarkington 117 

and unashamed; and has the interest for this study 
of exhibiting Mr. Tarkington at his most purple. 
As to Judge Pike himself, with his big, splotched, 
Henry-the-Eighth face and his bull-bass voice, as 
one critic put it, "when he was bad, he was very, 
very bad, and when he was good he was horrid." 
When he taunts the virtuous heroine with the loss of 
her gold you can fairly hear the hisses from the gal- 
lery. Mr. Fear's telling lawyer Joe not to worry 
about "gittin' law practice," that if there's no other 
way some of the "boys" will go out and make some 
"fer" him, is a stroke to bring down the house. The 
scene in which Joe confronts Judge Pike with his 
villainies is enough to send shivers down the spine of 
any reader not hopelessly "cultured up." And the 
"curtain," with Joe roaringly acclaimed idol of the 
populace, and Mayor-elect of Canaan, is quite the 
"great Harkless" "stunt" over again. 

The author lays it on with a dripping brush. And 
there can be no doubt that there is uncommon skill, 
and even power, in the way he does it. The defect is 
not in ability, but is one of taste. The " whole show" 
which the author has hit upon has an amusingly 
human quality, too, in that Joe's spectacular career 
is the "pipe dream," with himself in the role of 
hero, of every wastrel born; and so, doubtless, in 
some form or other, is in the thoughts of all those 
whose thoughts are the long, long thoughts of youth. 



118 Booth Tarkington 

In places in The Conquest of Canaan the resemblance 
to real life, one must say, is pretty faint; yet here, 
too, as in all of Mr. Tarkington's work, the effect is 
that somehow we do seem to be tasting life even 
when our credulity is most overtaxed. As a "ripper" 
The Conquest of Canaan is, being more consistent, a 
more crafty artistic success than The Gentleman from 
Indiana; but it lacks the youthful sincerity, the rich- 
ness of imaginative inspiration, the flair, of the 
earlier book. All in all, it pointed away from the 
light. 



VI 

IN turning over the reviews of Mr. Tarkington's 
books, the notices contemporary with their pub- 
lication, one's interest is engaged by the num- 
ber of times the word "trifle" is applied as a term of 
designation. The term is invariably employed by 
these reviewers in a sympathetic sense, and it may 
be embraced as a happy one for its purpose. Its 
repetition, too, is suggestive of a critical fancy. In 
Mr. Tarkington's hands, the trifle — the short piece, 
light as air, and irradiant with color — becomes a 
distinct literary form (as the sonnet is a distinct 
form, or the essay). Mr. Tarkington's forte for 
these delicate morsels of unexpected flavor reminds 
one of nothing so much as Whistler's genius for 
debonair, exquisite, and inimitable little drawings in 
colored chalks. They, too, were trifles, and they 
were perfection. If the soul of Whistler were to 
come back among us as that of a writer, I think this 
author would write something very much in the 
form of Monsieur Beaucaire, or of Cherry, or (most 
likely of all) The Beautiful Lady. 

It may also be remarked that the sum of the 
world's literature of perfect trifles is not very large. 
Any collection of such pieces — were one to be made, 

119 



120 Booth Tarkington 

like the volumes of the World's Greatest Short- 
Stories — would have to give a good place to The 
Beautiful Lady. The very fetching opening of this 
very charming bagatelle — the discovery of the youth- 
ful and impoverished Neapolitan gentleman, his hu- 
miliated, shaven pate adorned in brilliant letters with 
the legend: Thidtre Folie-Rouge Revue de Printemps 
Tous les Soirs! and seated at a small table under an 
awning at "the centre of the inhabited world" (be- 
fore the Cafe de la Paix at the corner of the Place 
de l'Opera), the butt of an amused throng — suggests 
somewhat the bright air of the New Arabian Nights, 
and particularly the idea of the adventures of the 
young man with the cream tarts. The sparkling and 
whimsical beginning, this, of a delicately wrought idyl, 
the peculiar and illusive flavor of which is due in no 
small measure to the skill with which the author 
makes the very engaging Neapolitan tell the story 
in a variety of English which he flatters himself is 
triumphantly idiomatic, but which at times is fear- 
fully and wonderfully constructed. 

There is a suggestion of Stevenson, too, in the 
high polish of this curious style, in the niceties of 
the Neapolitan's language, which has something of 
a mincing step. Like himself, Ansolini's language is 
wonderfully "fine in the coat." And the lightly 
sketched villain, the fortune-hunting Prince Cara- 
vacioli, — monocle, handsome nose, toupee, yellow 



Booth Tarkington 121 

skin, dyed-black moustache, splendid height — is 
quite of the Stevenson type. The wild and kind- 
hearted young "North American nobleman," how- 
ever, Lambert It. Poor, Jr., who desired to "create 
considerable trouble for Paris," and whose slang and 
deportment so mystify the sober-minded Ansolini, is 
pure Tarkington. In the chapters in which the Nea- 
politan endeavors vainly to dissuade his charge from 
his announced purpose concerning Paris, and in the 
piquant contrast between the two young men — 
both gentlemen — there is humor of a very distin- 
guished order — humor of a quality which is to be 
found in few books. 

The glamorous Lady herself, the sense of a beau- 
tiful presence, is conveyed with something of the 
subtle touch of the author of The Portrait of a Lady. 
One of the achievements of The Beautiful Lady, how- 
ever, is that it is a very happy portrait of a gentle- 
man, a man of gentle birth and feeling, — Ansolini. 
The gentle, playful humor which pervades the story 
has a peculiarly fragrant quality. Quaintly droll is 
Ansolini's touching study of feet, pantaloons, and 
skirts. There is just enough criticism of life to give 
a desirable effect of body to the airy tale. And this 
is most ingeniously done, as it is through the eyes of 
Ansolini that one sees a group of "those strange 
beings of the Western republic, at whom we are 
perhaps too prone to pass from one of ourselves to 



122 Booth Tarkington 

another the secret smile, because of some little im- 
perfections of manner." If the characters of the 
story are hardly more than sketched in, they are 
distinctly, deliciously realized; and all of them is 
given that is essential to the play of the story. 

As is frequently the case with Mr. Tarkington, 
and quite as it should be with a "trifle," the story 
you are told is no story at all, or rather, if stated in 
the terms of a synopsis, a very foolish one; but you 
have been treated to a great deal of charm. Perhaps 
it is because of this reason, that the story is mainly 
a succession of little touches, that one likes it better 
after a second reading than at the first, and still 
better after the third. Try it. One hostile critic of 
The Beautiful Lady has been found, who remarked 
of the theme that "a French writer alone could 
have done it," — let us add, better, or even, as well. 
The Beautiful Lady, lacking the dramatic action of 
Beaucaire, equals it in its pathos, and surpasses it in 
the originality of its conception and in its whimsi- 
cally tender humor. 

The autobiographical trail throughout Mr. Tark- 
ington's work sometimes comes to light in unex- 
pected places. Among his escapades, Poor, Jr., you 
remember, dragged his "governess" with him to make 
the balloon ascent at the Porte Maillot "on a windy 
evening." With uproarious gusto Mr. Tarkington, 
in a letter to his nephews, written from Paris in 



Booth Tarkington 123 

1904, describes a balloon ascension there made by, 
so he signs himself, their "exalted Uncle." This 
letter concludes thus: 

Well, I know you envy me now as much as you 
admire me. Think of having an Uncle who has 
been up in a real balloon ! It isn't every boy that has 
that kind of an Uncle. Next time I go up (and I am 
going, because I have your interests at heart!) I 
want to take Papa John — but somehow I think 
we'll have to be diplomatic about it until we have 
come down safely. I would like to be the only rela- 
tive of you that has ever been up in a balloon, yet I 
am willing to give you a Grandfather, too, who has 
been as great a help to you as your Uncle. I admit 
it is a great sacrifice, but I can see what a great 
benefit it will be to you to have not only an Uncle, 
but a Grandfather, in the balloon business. Still, 
for the present, you have an Uncle who has been up 
in a balloon — to say nothing of an Aunt who dropped 
a hat on the top of the Eiffel Tower. 

Mr. Tarkington's discovery of Europe resulted in 
several "trifles." Some of these take on more in- 
terest in the light of a study of the whole, and the 
why and wherefore of his work, than they had 
simply as independent stories. One such in par- 
ticular is His Own People, an absurdly elementary 
sort of story, very well written. As a story, that is, 
as a plot and its development, one's first impression 
is that this tale is (so to say) so beardless that it 



124 Booth Tarkington 

seems a shame to attack it. The critic has an em- 
barrassed feeling that there is something ungentle- 
manly about such a course. Mr. Tarkington's assem- 
bling here of an altogether "bad lot" of Europeans 
of a very fashionable effect quite reminds one of the 
amusing collection of personages of this class in 
What Maisie Knew. Mr. James' types there, how- 
ever, carry the conviction of being the real article, 
and Mr. Tarkington's characters here have somewhat 
the effect of wearing a theatrical make-up for their 
parts — false moustaches, and that sort of thing. And 
the bogus nature of their distingue character is alto- 
gether too bogus to fool anybody less simple than the 
altogether too simple Robert Russ Mellin, of Cran- 
ston, Ohio, U. S. A. At least, that is the effect on 
the reader, though there is an intimation in the 
story that nobody could come up to the Robert 
Russ Mellin type in the Grand Central Station and 
sell him such a gold-brick as he would "fall for" in the 
fairy-land atmosphere of the Europe which he visits. 
And the transparent nature of this particular lot of 
crooks may be an intentional stroke of the author's, 
one of the points, in his mind, of the story. The 
figures of this unsavory group, perhaps, are designed 
as samples of a very populous class which infested 
the Europe of the time: they are so patently bogus 
in the picture, he might say, because that is the way 
they are. 



Booth Tarkington 125 

Though there is, even to the reader who is not in 
young Mr. Mellin's shoes, a bit of glamour about 
the villainess, the enchantress Helene, — a slow-music 
type which apparently Mr. Tarkington was much 
taken with artistically, as she appears again (or a 
reincarnation of her), under the same name even, in 
The Man from Home. The grotesque Honorable 
Chandler Pedlow, supposedly of the "North Ameri- 
can Chamber of Deputies," is done with all the 
exaggerated emphasis of the old time Bowery boards. 
But the author comes back again to very shrewdly 
perceived realism in his intellectually diverting 
sketch of the low-class Londoner, Sneyd, the won- 
derful English of whose type is quite equalled by 
Mr. Tarkington's mimicry of it. One of the main 
points of the little story, however, — from the point 
of view of critical study — is the homespun (and 
thoroughly Tarkingtonian) moral, which the author 
not only draws, but tells right out, and at consid- 
erable length. This Sunday-school lesson is that 
you are to appreciate the genuine, wholesome things 
back home in "the States," which are finer than all 
the glamorous foreign geegaws, — a little moral 
which recalls the conviction of Senator Rawson, in 
In the Arena, when he suspected that the fashionable 
Mrs. Protheroe would not after all come to meet 
him, that "the Stackpole girls were nobler by far 
at heart than many who might wear a king's-ransom's 



126 Booth Tarlcington 

worth of jewels round their throats at the opera- 
house in a large city." 

This (whether or not it is a "true story") juvenile 
and lurid story gets the high class quality which it 
has altogether from the excellence of the writing. 
The altogether charming opening, the picture of the 
glass-domed palm-room of the Grand Continental 
Hotel Magnifique in Rome, is very much in Mr. 
James' most agreeable manner. Remarkably sug- 
gestive of the delicate impressions of that cultivated 
gentleman is the fancy at play in the description of 
this place of "vasty heights and distances, filled with 
a mellow green light which filters down languidly 
through the upper foliage of tall palms, so that the 
two hundred people who may be refreshing or dis- 
playing themselves there at the tea-hour have some- 
thing the look of under-water creatures playing upon 
the sea-bed." And, a bit later in young Mr. Mellin's 
reverie, that "dozen men and women, dressed for 
dinner, with a goldfish officer or tioo among them, who 
swam leisurely through the aquarium on their way 
to the hotel restaurant" is much like one of Mr. 
James' graceful literary amenities. Further, the 
young Mr. Mellin even seems to be a sort of male 
counterpart to the onetime very celebrated Daisy 
Miller, in whose existence a sharp rebuke was aimed 
at American girls who travelled abroad. The fatuous 
complacence of Mr. Mellin's early savoring of the 



Booth Tarkington 127 

"superiority" of the old Europe, his puerile intoxi- 
cation with his idea of the "beau monde," with the 
"artificial odors," and the "sumptuousness" of "the 
finest essence of Old World society mingling in Cos- 
mopolis," is a carefully traced criticism of one aspect 
of Mr. Tarkington's own people. 

That passionately provincial American, Mr. Nich- 
olson, lays much stress on the "cosmopolitan" aspect 
of Mr. Tarkington as an Indiana writer. It is prob- 
able that Mr. Tarkington's continual cavorting about 
between various points in the United States (Kenne- 
bunkport, Maine, — New York City, — Princeton, 
New Jersey, — Chicago, — and Indianapolis) has a 
cosmopolitan air to such home-keeping hearts as Mr. 
Nicholson's. But Mr. Tarkington, — for all his resi- 
dence for a span in France and Italy, for all his en- 
thusiasm for the Island of Capri, where for a period 
he made his home, and despite the fact that during 
his sojourn in France he became acclimated to a de- 
gree that he was (as I have heard it put) "one of 
the craziest Frenchmen of the whole lot," — has 
never, in the remotest, been a cosmopolite in the 
sense that, say, Mr. James was; of whom it was one 
time said, with perhaps some asperity, that he "was 
at home in every country but his own." Again and 
again and again, in Mr. Tarkington's books it is 
asked of the globe-trotter in the Hoosier land if he 
does not find the atmosphere here dull, "provincial," 



128 Booth Tarkington 

"unsympathetic"? And his answer to this question 
is designed to go a long way in showing him up 
either as a decent fellow or a cad. Joe Louden finds 
Canaan "bully"; Valentine Corliss is decidedly su- 
perior to Capitol City. And if it cannot be said that 
Mr. Tarkington abroad was at heart himself decid- 
edly the man from "home" (and doubtless such an 
observation would wing its way to where it would 
appear pretty bizarre), in his work we find him 
abroad in humorous sympathy, at least, with the 
crassest of his fellow countrymen. 

Daniel Voorhees Pike, attorney at law, Kokomo, 
Indiana, the "Man from Home," is a humorist- 
critic of Old World society quite back in the vein of 
The Innocents Abroad, and doubtless would weep with 
Mark Twain over the grave of Adam. In his bois- 
terous ridicule of various traditional Continental 
ideas he is very much in the spirit of Martin Chuzzle- 
wit reversed. Mr. Pike would "not trade the State 
Insane Asylum at home for the worst ruined ruin in 
Europe." But the joke is not altogether on Mr. Pike; 
he is a sort of American Don Quixote, beautiful in his 
grotesqueness. While the authors of the play, Mr. 
Tarkington in collaboration with Harry Leon Wil- 
son, banter him with hilarious joy in his outlook, they 
also respect his genuineness and hard-headed worth. 
The prodigious joke of the play, indeed, has been on 
the American theatre audience. Whenever, with, of 



Booth Tarhington 129 

course, humorous intention, Mr. Pike is made to 
make the eagle scream most vociferously, these very 
screams have evoked volumes of applause in earnest 
approval of the sentiments expressed. "Yes, 
ma'am!" says Mr. Pike, "there's just as many 
kinds of people in Kokomo as there is in Pekin." 
"Hurrah! Right-O!" has come from the throats of 
innumerable spiritual brothers and sisters of Mr. 
Pike in the house. So this frolic conceived in a spirit 
of good natured satire has had the curiously misdi- 
rected reward of, almost, one continuous succession 
of wonderfully successful gallery-plays. Ethel is en- 
raged at Mr. Pike's audacity in prying into the 
affairs of the Earl of Hawcastle to learn what is 
thought of him by "the best citizens." "Why, I'd 
'a done that," says Mr. Pike, "if it had been the 
Governor of Indiana himself!" (Loud applause.) 
The Man from Home, as a "spectacular conglomera- 
tion" (as the circus posters say) of such "heart 
throbs" (as they have proved to be) as this, is cer- 
tainly a remarkable production. 

This play of joint authorship exhibits in what 
might be called an undraped way many of Mr. Tark- 
ington's principal foibles as a constructor of plots. 
Here, as, in a measure, in many of his stories, we 
have a situation depending on the meretricious de- 
vice of a series of misunderstandings and mistaken 
identities. Behold: quite at the right moment the 



130 Booth Tarkington 

supposedly simple German traveller, affably ad- 
dressed by the Kokomoian as "Doc," turns out to 
be the powerful Grand-Duke Vasili Vasilivitch (even 
as Beaucaire stood revealed a prince of the royal 
blood) ; zip ! an escaped anarchist is whisked into the 
disguise of a chauffeur; a whole company of tricksters, 
male and female (little better, as Mr. Pike intimated, 
than a lot of Terre Hut pickpockets), pass themselves 
off as the flower of European aristocracy; and the Man 
from Home himself, in reality the brightest, shrewd- 
est, most forceful personality of the whole lot, volun- 
tarily poses as a very simple, ingenuous personality. 
All this is clearly brought forward by Mr. Frederick 
Taber Cooper in his careful, brief study of Mr. 
Tarkington, published a number of years ago in his 
Some American Story Tellers, or perhaps it is better 
to say, his study of the Mr. Tarkington of a number 
of years ago. 

And the authors of the play lean very heavily 
indeed upon one of Mr. Tarkington's favorite trumps 
as a romanticist: coincidence. Mr. Cooper, who con- 
cerns himself almost altogether with the structure 
of this play, rides very hard the fact that every- 
thing happens in the nick of time: "a person is 
named, and miraculously he appears upon the scene; 
a secret is breathed, and somewhere a window or 
door opens stealthily and the secret is captured. 
A tangle of situations is tightly knotted up and 



Booth Tarkington 131 

the only people who can unravel it are supposedly 
scattered widely throughout Europe and Asia, — and 
presto! they are all discovered simultaneously be- 
neath the roof of a Sicilian hotel." Time worn, and 
time honored, stage tricks, all. The note of "glori- 
fied melodrama" in all this amusing kind of thing 
of course cannot be denied. But that note, it is 
becoming more and more plain, most certainly is 
not, as this critic then found, "the essence of Booth 
Tarkington." 

But what else, it may be asked with some reason, 
is there to The Man from Home besides glorified 
melodrama? Certainly the characters, though ani- 
mated enough, are, — from Mr. Pike, on through, — 
the veriest manikins. The young Englishman, suitor 
for the hand (and settlement) of Miss Ethel Granger- 
Simpson, is just about as much of a wooden-Indian- 
on-wheels figure, as an Englishman, as the imme- 
morial comic Irishman of the vaudeville stage is an 
authentic Irishman. And the sport made by Mr. 
Pike of ancestors, ruins, settlements, and so on, is 
regular American barber-shop humor, name-blown- 
in-the-bottle brand. Just so. 

It is what might be called the "philosophy" of the 
play which is the meat of the nut for the student of 
the soul of Mr. Tarkington. The melodrama of it is 
incidental. If the authors of his being did not de- 
sign the rampant provincialism of Mr. Pike as a 



132 Booth Tarkington 

trumpet call to the plain American citizen, and were 
making game of this a bit, in fact, at bottom they 
were altogether with Mr. Pike at his shrewdest. They 
were quite with Mr. Pike when he told his ward, 
Miss Simpson, that she was looking for something 
which there was nothing "to." They were heartily 
Kokomoian themselves in their disdain for the 
"Granger-Simpson" kind of affectation. And Mr. 
Tarkington, at least, cannot be accused of putting on 
for the occasion the home-grown, common philosophy 
of D. V. Pike. It is a point of view with which he has 
right along been in sympathy. It is the philosophy 
of Piatt viile. Tom Martin, for instance, who, in 
"Great Men's Sons," drew his own shrewd rustic 
moral from UAiglon after witnessing its production 
by Mme. Bernhardt and M. Coquelin at the "met- 
ropolis" of his state, commanded the trade in Dry 
Goods and Men's Clothing at Plattville. And 
though this slight but very effective sketch, Great 
Men's Sons (which has the effect of a verbatim 
report), first published in a magazine under the title 
of The Old Grey Eagle, is included in the collection of 
political stories, In the Arena, it does not logically so 
much belong there as it does, for purposes of com- 
parative consideration, among what may be called 
Mr. Tarkington's foreign stories. 

Great Men's Sons also gets its point, — the kind of 
point that Mr. Tarkington is fond of making in his 



Booth TarJcington 133 

foreign stories,— from the suggested contrast between 
the romantic glamour of thrones and titles and the 
simple pathos of actuality. The identical thing 
which as handled in The Man from Home is somewhat 
in the nature of slap-stick humor is very real and 
poignant in Great Men's Sons, where it has a kind of 
simple nobility. The violent comparison, made by Mr. 
Pike, in the play, of the ambition of Miss Granger 
(to ally herself with English "society") with little 
Annie Hoffmeyer (in Great Men's Sons), whose "pa" 
was a carpenter in Kokomo, and who couldn't get into 
the local Ladies' Literary Club, so got her "pa" to 
give her the money to marry Artie Seymour, the 
minister's son — this is exactly the effect of contrast 
wrought in the sketch where the character of "that 
ornery little cuss" L'Aiglon is compared, by the 
old pioneer, with the tale of silent self-sacrifice and 
splendid courage presented in the career of Orlando 
T. Bicker's boy: a young fellow with, as it is said, 
"the right kind of stuff in him" who fought an 
almost hopeless battle educating his sisters and 
younger brother, held the family together, kept his 
mother from want and won the love and respect of 
the whole community; and then, on the threshold of 
achievement, broke down from overwork and died as 
uncomplainingly as he had lived, without ever a 
thought that he had done anything more than his 
simple duty. It should be clear enough that Mr. 



134 Booth Tarkington 

Tarkington, cosmopolite (if you will), aristocrat, col- 
lector of objets d'art, sincerely and greatly admires 
the homespun virtues. He is even naive about it. 
And he is continually telling Sunday-school stories; 
what he had in mind in Mister Antonio (he one day 
let drop) was a Sunday-school story. 

A touch further characteristic of the man who 
wrote Great Men's Sons (and Cherry) appears in the 
author's attitude toward the "high brow" "bounce" 
talked, in "a spikey little voice," by the character 
"Little Fiderson," "whose whole nervous person 
jerkily sparkled L'Aiglon enthusiasm." Was it not 
a notion of Dr. Johnson's that of all cant the worst 
was the "cant of criticism"? Doubtless the Tar- 
kingtonian "horse-sense" of the great Cham of let- 
ters, if one may so put it, would have snorted, too, 
at Fiderson's: "I thought that after Wagram I 
could feel nothing more; emotion was exhausted; 
but then came that magnificent death! It was 
tragedy made ecstatic; pathos made into music; the 
grandeur of a gentle spirit, conquered physically but 
morally unconquerable! Goethe's 'More Light' out- 
shone!" 

But the doctor had considerable reverence, a kind 
of superstitious reverence maybe, for learning. And 
it is one of Mr. Tarkington's peculiarities that he 
shies at any suggestion of the "lofty dome" kind of 
thing. Some time ago (I have heard) he was walking 



Booth Tarkington 135 

in a street of his midland city when he met an old 
school acquaintance, now a professor in an eastern 
university. 

"Hello, Albert," said Mr. Tarkington. 

"Hello, Booth," said the professor. 

"Let me see, what is it you are doing now?" asked 
Mr. Tarkington. And then he added quickly: "Oh, 
yes, I remember now. You are doing the serious." 

The Middle Western people are preeminently hu- 
morous, particularly those of the Southern strain 
from which Lincoln sprang. And "blue jeans" philos- 
ophy, it may not be without point to note, has ever 
been one of the staples of the Indiana literary crop. 
It permeates, of course, and is the tang and savor of, 
the works of "Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone," better 
known the world round by his real name of Riley. 

I ain't, ner don't p'tend to be 
Much posted on philosophy; 
But thare is times, when all alone, 
I work out idees of my own. 

It is their native "horse-sense" which gives the 
"punch" to the fables of George Ade. And the 
Hoosier relish for the shrewd, homespun point of 
view is so pronounced that the feature in the local 
press which corresponds to the humorous column of 
greater metropolitan papers takes the turn of homely 
philosophy. Abe Martin, the hypothetical Brown 



136 Booth TarJcington 

County sage, whose sayings are reported daily by 
Mr. Kin Hubbard in the Indianapolis News, has been 
for years (though his existence is purely of the spirit) 
one of the best-known public figures of Indiana. His 
Piatt ville-like observations last night were: "We all 
make fun of a circus behind its back. Mrs. Tilford 
Moot's niece has three children — two goin' t' school 
an' one t' th' dentist's." 

Next after His Own People Mr. Tarkington pub- 
lished another foreign story, a novel in length, but 
another trifle in the light charm of its atmosphere 
(though it is indeed a tragi-comedy), The Guest of 
Quesnay, first issued in 1908. Some of Mr. Tarking- 
ton's enthusiastic admirers pronounced this the best 
piece of fiction he had produced up to that time, — 
while from other of his friends a reverse verdict has 
come. So much, at least, as Mr. Cooper acknowl- 
edges certainly is true: it is "a very agreeable Sum- 
mer idyl pervaded by the soft sunshine, the fra- 
grance of flowers and the singing of birds." And of 
its setting this critic happily adds that it is one 
which altogether brings "a thrill of nostalgia for the 
highways and byways of rural France," of the France 
of yesterday, before the World War. The Guest of 
Quesnay, too, has its own contributions to make to 
a study of the development of Mr. Tarkington's 
talent. 

In this story, for one thing, the philosophy is not 



Booth Tarhington 137 

of the homely variety, but it is — what startled some 
reviewers at the time of its publication — metaphysi- 
cal. And, as one commentator noted, one would as 
soon have expected to find metaphysics in a bird's 
song as in one of Booth Tarkington's stories. In one 
place The Guest of Quesnay was banteringly received 
as "Booth Tarkington's happy discovery of the scien- 
tific process of regeneration." And perhaps in this 
book the author did indeed make some happy dis- 
coveries, — discoveries of qualities of mind which later 
he cultivated to effect. 

The underlying mystery of The Guest of Quesnay 
is so transparent at least as early in its progress as 
the fifth or sixth chapter that, as in a leisurely 
fashion the story plays out its course, the reader 
is put in mind of that pleasant situation in the drama 
where there are plainly visible to the audience the legs 
of a gentleman much sought by the sword of his 
stage enemy, who industriously pokes about in every 
place but the right one. Any reader with a tithe of 
a mind in his head would know at once that the 
romantically beautiful and innocent young man with 
the Monte Cristo hair and the "singularly singular" 
manner who comes to the out-of -the- world Normandy 
inn, was, by some strange metamorphosis, none other 
than the powdered Silenus first met as one of the 
sights of the boulevards. Neither would he be long 
in doubt that the reputed "American lady who mar- 



138 Booth Tarkington 

ried a French nobleman/' Madame d'Armond, guest 
at the nearby chateau, was — unknown to him — the 
wife lost to this strange gentleman. Though the be- 
guiling busy-body who recounts the tale of it all, 
being himself much mystified by the Sinbad-the- 
Sailor character of the circumstances, succeeds in 
surrounding his people and his events with a certain 
amount of verbal fog. 

A thing which strongly attracts the interest in a 
survey of Mr. Tarkington's work from first to last 
is this author's facility for investing himself with a 
style happily suited to each particular occasion. He 
has never become set in any one manner; never, as 
so many writers do, after having achieved success in 
one manner, has he continued to exploit a field al- 
ready won. Mr. Chesterton, for instance (Grand 
Young Man of England that he is), is forever the 
same — Mr. Chesterton, master journalist. With Mr. 
Tarkington, as ever with the incorrigible artist, each 
creative bout is a wholly new adventure. The man- 
ner, the style, of The Guest of Quesnay is peculiar 
among Mr. Tarkington's books. For one thing, it is 
not often that, as here, he tells his story in the first 
person. He objects to this method on the ground (I 
have heard him say) that it is "too easy." 

Much of the charm of The Guest of Quesnay un- 
doubtedly arises from the pretty, essayical character 
of its style: leisurely in method, descriptive, discursive, 



Booth Tarkington 139 

mildly witty, gently sentimental . It has altogether an 
amusingly George- William-Curtis effect. This style 
is deliciously indicative of the character of the mid- 
dle-aged, amateurish and conservative-minded land- 
scape painter who tells the story, and his character 
in the role of narrator is essential to the success of the 
whole effect. The author slyly simulates the style of 
a man who, though he writes very well, professes that 
he is not a trained writer. One especially pleasant 
instance of the musty-bachelor humor of the writer 
appears in his soliloquy about the contrast of his 
antiquated dress clothes with those of the sartorially 
unexceptionable other gentlemen at the dinner party 
at Quesnay: "clothes differing from the essential so 
vitally as did mine must have seemed immodest, 
little better than no clothes at all." Just a touch of 
Mr. Tarkington's inveterate admiration for sterling 
worth is given to the character of the narrator of 
the story, in whom an honest heart beat beneath a 
poor man's coat. 

One of the things which mark The Guest of Quesnay 
as a novel beyond the ordinary is its striking pictorial 
quality; the Paris streets and pleasant byways of the 
so much loved French countryside are "seen" with a 
joyousness in the singing qualities of color which 
reminds one of French impressionist painting. The 
vivid and sumptuous opening scene, the pageant of 
the boulevard, — women prevalent over all the con- 



140 Booth TarJcingion 

course; "fine women in fine clothes; rich women in 
fine clothes; poor women in fine clothes," — brings to 
mind one of the urban canvases of Pissarro. The 
monstrous figure which rolls into this scene, the ap- 
palling wreck of dissipation, the infamous Larrabee 
Harman, with "the look of a half -poisoned Augustan 
borne down through the crowds from Palatine after 
supping with Caligula," has revolted some moral 
readers. And doubtless he was intended by the 
author to be revolting enough. For my own part, 
however, I felt only a child-like delight in the gorge- 
ousness of his ruin. The author spared nothing to 
make of him a champion. And Harman is as rich 
in degradation as Long John Silver is in villainy. 
While his consort, in the spectacular white automo- 
bile, the savagely graceful, dyed, enamelled dancer, 
la belle Mariana, is, as a bit of cynical drawing, almost 
Degasesque. And this Mariana, though we do not 
see a great deal of her, is of a good deal of signifi- 
cance. She is of the evil sisterhood which has so 
curiously attracted this author's scalpel. The Spanish 
courtesan, Mariana, whose nature is observed with 
a scientific lens, is of the same human stock as 
Claudine, and as the flirt Cora Madison, and the 
green-eyed Sibyl Sheridan. 

The Guest of Quesnay is distinguished, too, among 
later-day novels by its elfish relish for character. 
The "most henlike waiter in France," Amedee, bab- 



Booth Tarkington 141 

bier, scandal-mongering, with the soul-of-honor pose 
and the eloquent gestures, whose talents were indeed 
lost in the country, and his friend the gossiping 
gardener Jean Ferret, are conceptions of delicious 
comedy. "Truly, truly," as Amedee would say. It 
is pleasant to note, too, in this maitre d'hotel, as a 
child of Mr. Tarkington's brain, that (though we are 
led to believe he cannot) he is convinced that he 
can sing. 

Among the most amusing, attractive, and real of 
all Mr. Tarkington's "females," as Fenimore Cooper 
used to term his women characters, must be counted 
the incorrigible damsel, the thistle-brained creature, 
the elfin young lady Anne Elliott, she of the same 
name as the young lady of a very different type in 
Miss Austen's Persuasion; she who had the "infan- 
tile father," and who had not had a "syllable of food" 
since dawn. Most of the women in Mr. Tarkington's 
earlier books, it must be admitted, are not so much 
actual women as the embodiment of romantic and 
chivalrous dreams of women: Lady Mary Carlisle, 
Miss Sylvia Gray, and Helen Sherwood are examples 
of figures which in lifelikeness merely suffice for the 
movement of the story. Though Mrs. Protheroe 
takes on something of the air of this world. Miss 
Elliott, however, though very lightly sketched, is 
more nearly, in the slang phrase, "all there" than is 
usual in the author's earlier books. 



14£ Booth Tarkington 

The author's humorous conception in his Professor 
Keredec of a mountain walking is carried out with 
engaging zest. And Mr. Tarkington always shines 
in depicting the rattish type. His fox-faced youth 
Oil Poicy — which translated out of the New York 
argot would be Mr. Earl Percy — has in an abundant 
measure this author's Dickensian gusto for the hu- 
morous in low life. In fact, a reflection which must 
have struck the attentive reader of Mr. Tarkington 
is that if, instead of being inclined toward the more 
wholesome type of American story, he cared to do 
the sordid-side-of-big-cities kind of thing, which ap- 
peals so strongly to some of the younger men, he 
might out-Gissing the Gissingest. 

But the startling thing about this summer story is 
the author's flirtation there with ideas of some con- 
siderable profundity. Mr. Cooper, in his study, has 
the "born story teller" within Mr. Tarkington neatly 
"rescued" from the "would-be maker of purposeful 
and serious fiction." And, as one of the reviewers 
of The Guest of Quesnay noted, Mr. Tarkington's 
"psychological optimism," his method there of mak- 
ing a good man out of a bad man, is perhaps "almost 
as impractical as Christianity." Still Christianity 
has advocates of its points. And the ethical beauty 
of the idea Mr. Tarkington has employed can hardly 
be denied. If it is, perhaps, not a new idea; yet no 
(or very few) ideas are. The thing of moment is 



Booth Tarkingion 143 

that, as a popular novelist, lie was concerned with 
it, or indeed had dalliance with any such idea at all. 

Persons whose pasts, like that of Larrabee Harman, 
alias Oliver Saffren, have been blotted out by some 
injury to the brain have been the theme of more 
novels than it would be of any profit to number. 
Mr. Cooper, however, finds in this story a fresh 
suggestion: that we are all of us hampered by our 
knowledge of the evil in the world at large and more 
specifically in ourselves; and that if upon reaching 
maturity some circumstances should obliterate all 
this, leaving our minds as virgin as in early child- 
hood, and give us a chance to start over again, to 
ignore evil and learn only what is good, we might 
make of ourselves far nobler men and women than 
we were before. The author rests with this sug- 
gestion; he proves nothing, nor does he try. His 
story ends on the threshold of the new life, with 
Harman recovered for youth and beauty and good- 
ness; whether he is a permanently reformed charac- 
ter, or whether he slowly but inevitably drifts back 
into his old evil ways — perhaps is beside the point. 

Professor Keredec is an idealist believing in the 
immutable goodness of man's spirit; and his meta- 
physics are of the order which do not bother about 
what has gone by and what is to come. "That is 
not alive. It is not!" And a man who shakes off 
his sin is clean; he stands as pure as if he had never 



144 Booth Tarkington 

sinned. But though his emancipation can be so 
perfect, there is a law that he cannot escape from 
the result of all the bad and foolish things he has 
done, for every act, every breath you draw, is im- 
mortal, and each has a consequence that is never 
ending. Now, in considering Mr. Tarkington, a very 
interesting thing about this idea of the moral con- 
sequences of natural law is that the same idea, in a 
somewhat more elementary form of expression, oc- 
curred to another of the author's erring heroes, none 
other than Hedrick Madison, who knew that "a 
man might become great, rich, honoured, and have a 
large family, but his one soft sin would follow him, 
hunt him out, and pull him down at last." 

It was a bit before The Guest of Quesnay appeared 
that Mr. Maurice in his article in The Bookman sug- 
gested that it was perhaps odd that Mr. Tarkington, 
having so many of his intimates among writers, ac- 
tors, and painters, had never taken one such char- 
acter as the theme of a book; and Mr. Maurice 
concluded that maybe it was because such a study 
was not adapted to the nature of Mr. Tarkington's 
talent. Subtle and elaborate analysis of the com- 
plexities and perversities of the artistic temperament 
is a field, naturally, much worked by writers of a 
complex artistic temperament and an introspective 
method. Mr. Tarkington doubtless deliberately 
avoids what a number of his characters refer to as 



Booth Tarhington 145 

the habit of petty analysis. And as an artist him- 
self he is in effect as direct and simple as a bird is an 
artist in song. While it was convenient to have the 
gentleman who tells the story of The Guest of Quesnay 
a "painter fellow,"and made quite appropriate in the 
story many extra, pretty touches of blossoms and 
color, and sensitive appreciation of women as orna- 
ments, this American of the class of those expatriates 
who "didn't go home in time," is much more of a 
gentleman merely than a painter. That he is not only 
an amateur, but a pure type of amateur, is every- 
where apparent; and though his friend Ward is a 
professional, he is a "society painter " and so not at all 
of the kingdom of serious art. The Guest of Quesnay 
is not only not at all a portrait of a painter as 
Evelyn Innes is a study of the musical temperament, 
but the art talk in the book any painter who takes 
himself seriously would call babble. 

Most of the writers who make studies of the 
artistic temperament take their artists with deadly 
seriousness, as though there were nothing in the 
world so momentous as the intricate workings of 
their souls. Mr. Tarkington seems not to take ar- 
tists, and intellectuals, very seriously; all of his are 
amateurs: Crailey Gray is an amateur poet; John 
Harkless, though dramatically successful, is an ama- 
teur country editor; Roger Tabor, who worked in 
paint "after the Spencerian fashion," is a tragically 



146 Booth Tarhington 

amateurish figure of an artist; and Bibbs certainly 
is an amateur as an essayist, and would have done 
surprisingly well, as Doc Gurney observed, if he 
could have made four or five hundred dollars a year 
by writing by the time he was fifty. 

The essay style of the early part of The Guest of 
Quesnay skillfully shifts in the tenser scenes, as the 
story mounts to its climax, to (almost) the dramatic 
form of pure dialogue. The daintily vivacious chap- 
ter wherein the indomitable Miss Elliott employs the 
idea of a drawing lesson as a ruse to call upon the 
painter at Les Trois Pigeons that the two of them 
may fence with Mr. Earl Percy, is like a tiny one- 
act play. The melodramatic climax of the story is 
a very illuminating point in an examination of Mr. 
Tarkington's conception of the world; but not be- 
cause of its melodrama. It is because of the inten- 
sity of the presentation of the nature of Louise Har- 
man's love for the man to whom she "belongs." It 
was, as the author says, a whole love, for "she was 
not only wife, but mother to .him." In a newspaper 
interview some time ago Mr. Tarkington was asked 
how literature had been affected by the suffrage 
movement and "feminism." He was reported to 
have replied (looking up in some surprise)," I haven't 
heard of any change." Mr. Tarkington's ideal of 
womankind is always the same, and his interpreta- 
tion of the phenomena of love never varies, through- 



Booth Tarkington 147 

out his stories. He sees these things very much as 
eighteenth century Fielding did; and Louise Harinan 
is a sister heroine to Amelia Booth. 

One cannot say that Mr. Tarkington's treatment 
of the theme of the relations of the sexes ever rises 
to heights of sublime dignity, ever to the level of 
impassioned poetry, as, for instance, in that famous 
scene of Meredith's Richard and Lucy in the woods 
by the lake. And on the other hand, he is about as 
erotic as Scott. Some of the love in his romances 
could be called little more than Valentine sentiment. 
Yet a peculiar charm of his fiction is the sweetness, 
fidelity and goodness of his womankind, the moral 
fairness of his leading ladies. He believes in the 
alchemic power of "a good woman" as he would 
have readers of The Guest of Quesnay believe in Pro- 
fessor Keredec. His quaintly adoring, poetic ideal 
of women as guardians of what is good in men, as 
some eloquent reviewer has somewhere observed, is 
an inspiration which gives his earlier books much of 
their tearful, smiling, tender radiance, their caroling 
hopefulness. 

The women of his ideal are of the sort that give 
with both hands, rather than receive. The shy, 
gauche Ariel Tabor, returned from Europe trans- 
formed into a vision of feminine grace and charm, 
gives to Joe Louden the one needful incentive to keep 
him from weakening at the crucial moment of his 



148 Booth Tarhington 

fight to conquer Canaan. Mary Vertrees gives to 
Bibbs the spirit to find music in the hitherto loathed 
zinc-clipping-machine. And the more "down" their 
lovers are the more Mr. Tarkington's heroines con- 
sider it a point of their womanhood to stand by 
them. When Ethel Simpson, in The Man from 
Home, perceives the rascality of the situation of her 
betrothal she feels bound to her affianced by his very 
dishonor, which she believes it her place to share. 
While the noble feminine character which Mr. Tark- 
ington, along with the rest of the world, so greatly 
admires cannot with justice be said to be absent 
from life, still it need hardly be said that Mr. Tark- 
ington, even in his satirical realism, has never in his 
fiction been inclined to abandon that very humanly 
appealing convention of the early novel, — the "hero- 
ine," companion figure to his "hero." The saintly 
heroine, it may be remarked, has ever been an ar- 
tistic weakness in the fiction of men of gallant heart. 
And Mary Vertrees, in Mr. Tarkington's most am- 
bitious book, is quite as much of a paragon, an angel, 
as poor Amelia Osborne. 

Mr. Tarkington's constant reader is never per- 
mitted to lose track of the fact that the adorable 
woman, whether she be statuesque or dainty, regal 
or Cinderella, is of the company of the mothers of 
the race. All the heroines to whom this author 
gives his own heart are pronouncedly of the maternal 



Booth Tarkington 149 

type. Helen Sherwood "was a born mother." And 
in those ebullient days when he wrote The Gentleman 
from Indiana, before Mr. Tarkington in his realism 
had embraced the virtue of literary restraint, in Miss 
Sherwood's solicitude about rubbers and umbrellas 
for surrounding men folk the author certainly piled 
it on in the glorious matter of her mothering in- 
stincts. Fanchon Bareaud, too, would have followed 
Crailey Gray to the wars "to hold a parasol over 
him under the dangerous sun, to cook his meals 
properly, to watch over him with medicines and 
blankets and a fan"; her heart breaking with the 
"crucial yearning to mother him." And Laura 
Madison, heavenly foil to Mr. Tarkington's Becky 
Sharp, stepped back a little as her lover came to- 
ward her in the great greeting: "Ashes had blown 
upon her, and oh, the old, old thought of the woman 
born to be a mother! she was afraid his clothes 
might get dusty if he came too close." 

There is, to be noted, too, another salient charac- 
teristic of Mr. Tarkington's heroines: there are no 
Emma McChesnies among them; they are all ladies, 
the product of a sheltered rearing. And, as with 
Mary Vetrees, their going to be stenographers would 
be unthinkable. 

Mr. Tarkington's trifles have, so to put it, a rather 
wide range of musical scale. Next in order of publi- 
cation after The Guest of Quesnay, and the play The 



150 Booth Tarkington 

Man from Home, came Beasley's Christmas Party, 
which was followed in turn by a very different sort 
of trifle indeed, Beauty and the Jacobin. The Tiny 
Tim sort of tale, Beasley's Christmas Party, may be 
viewed in an aspect in which it contributes several 
considerable strokes to building up a portrait of the 
author as a man at home. In Who's Who Mr. Tark- 
ington gives his "home" as North Pennsylvania 
Street, Indianapolis. And the spirit of the neigh- 
borhood of his residence would seem to be cele- 
brated in the description of the part of the state 
capital, "Main wright," in which the Honorable 
David Beasley had his "homely and beautiful," big, 
old-fashioned brick house, "set well away from the 
street among some splendid forest trees, with a fair 
spread of lawn." This was in a quiet part of this 
"metropolis"; business stopped short of it, and "the 
fashionable residence section had overleaped it, leav- 
ing it undisturbed and unchanging, with that look 
about it which is the quality of few urban quarters, 
and eventually of none, as a town grows to be a city 
— the look of still being a neighborhood." Mr. 
Tarkington, one gathers, has the reputation of being 
a famous club-man; again and again in his books the 
reader comes upon what apparently are strong con- 
victions as to what this club-man thinks a house 
ought to be. "It was impossible to imagine a child's 
toy wagon left upon a walk or driveway of the New 



Booth Tarhington 151 

House" of the Sheridans in The Turmoil. "It re- 
vealed nothing of the people who lived in it save 
that they were rich." 

There are houses that cannot be detached from 
their own people without protesting; every inch of 
mortar seems to mourn the separation, and such a 
house — no matter what be done to it — is ever mur- 
murous with regret, whispering the old name sadly 
to itself unceasingly. But the New House was of a 
kind to change hands without emotion. 

And occasionally the reader of the books of this 
man about the world gets a caustic criticism of the 
life which is not lived in houses at all. Miss Fanchon, 
of New York, Long Shore, and Paris, who perhaps 
found Penrod a bit "boor jaw," was "one of those 
grown-up little girls, wonderful product of the winter 
apartment and summer hotel." 

The house of David Beasley's was a house. "It 
gave back a great deal for your glance, just as some 
people do. . . . Or, driving by, of an evening, you 
would have liked to hitch your horse and go in; it 
spoke so surely of hearty, old-fashioned people liv- 
ing there, who would welcome you merrily." 

It looked like a house where there were a grand- 
father and a grandmother; where holidays were 
warmly kept; where there were boisterous family 



152 Booth Tarkington 

reunions to which uncles and aunts, who had been 
born there, would return from no matter what dis- 
tances; a house where big turkeys would be on the 
table often; where one called "the hired man" (and 
named either Abner or Ole) would crack walnuts 
upon a flatiron clutched between his knees on the 
back porch; it looked like a house where they played 
charades; where there would be long streamers of 
evergreen and dozens of wreaths of holly at Christ- 
mas-time; where there were tearful, happy weddings 
and great throwing of rice after little brides, from 
the broad front steps. 

The sentiment of a joyous domestic life, so hila- 
riously expressed in Beasley's Christmas Party, would 
seem to be an atmosphere quite natural to Mr. Tark- 
ington's own existence. In his correspondence with 
his youthful nephews (some old letters reveal) he 
frequently addressed them in such manner as "My 
Dear Sirs," or "Gentlemen of the Guard," or "Share 
Awfaw," which he explained was "the way the Eng- 
lish pronounce 'Cher Enfants,' and means * Wicked 
Boys'"; and he had a habit of subscribing himself 
"Your docile Uncle," "Your descriptive uncle," and 
so on. One nosing in his library comes upon a vol- 
ume of early writings by and about himself collected 
from magazines, together with some picturesque 
photographs, which bears the inscription from his 
father: "Selected and bound for Booth Tarkington, 
by Papa John." 



Booth TarJcington 153 

Beasley 9 s Christmas Party is dedicated to James 
Whitcomb Riley. It might be suspected that there 
was more in this than its appropriateness to the vein 
of kindly sentiment in the story, and its theme of in- 
terpreting the life of the affections. Lockerbie Street, 
as well as (perhaps even more than) the neighbor- 
hood of the Tarkington homestead, fits the apprecia- 
tive description of Beasley's neighborhood. And one 
may find more than a hint of Riley in the character of 
the whimsical, "lovable," "Sol-Smith-Russell-look- 
ing" Beasley. Though the author disclaims any 
consciousness, at least, of such an inspiration. 

Beasley and the Hunchbergs, which was the earlier 
title of the story, or rather of an early version of the 
later story, appeared in a magazine about four years 
before the book publication. In the earlier form 
Beasley, and little Hamilton Swift and his Hunch- 
bergs were about all there was to the sketch ; the pleas- 
ant love note, which made of the sketch a story, was 
(certainly very adroitly) worked up afterward, per- 
haps in response to a call for a thorough-going Christ- 
mas carol. The roundabout evolution of the story 
perhaps explains the singular style in which it is 
cast, a style you might call a curiously informal or 
neglig£ style, one which (though here again quite 
appropriate to its purpose) is so strangely unlike 
this author elsewhere, and so amazingly unlike the 
style of, for instance, the penrod stories. 



154 



Booth Tarhington 



In Beasleijs Christmas Party, though Mr. Tark- 
ington continues brilliantly to eschew those deli- 
cately tangled emotions experienced by the supreme 
few, we find numerous turns of thought reminiscent 
of Mr. James. Is it not a pleasantly Henry-Jamesian 
glance, this: "I knew at once that she was Miss 
Apperthwaite, she 'went so,' as they say, with her 
mother; nothing could have been more suitable." ? 
We find again Mr. Tarkington's curious attraction 
toward speaking from out the atmosphere of a 
profession he never, in the least, was of, — provincial 
journalism. We find more melodious darkey singing: 

Ah met mah sistuh in a-mawnin'. 

In the observations of the old negro Bob, we find 
perhaps an increasing humor in Mr. Tarkington's 
extraordinary gift for impersonating the Afro- 
American servant. And, a thing of particular in- 
terest to our purpose here, we find an early manifes- 
tation of Mr. Tarkington's serious interest as an 
artist in the psychology of childhood. Beasley's 
Christmas Party is not (as at first blush it may 
appear) purely an orgy of sentiment; nor is the elfin 
Hamilton Swift a mere Peter Pan sprite. His 
vagaries are scientifically sound, — as should be 
recognized by many mothers of precocious children, 
queer ones. Though it should not be hard to recall 
mystified parents of some children who have dis- 



Booth Tarkington 155 

played aberrations not dissimilar to those of Ham- 
ilton Swift who have thought their offspring awful 
liars, or insane. Finally, little Hamilton Swift's 
peculiar faculties resulted from a nervous ailment, 
and in Mr. Tarkington's tender little sketch of him 
one begins to discover in this author what alto- 
gether seems to be a sort of flair of his for nervous 
diseases. 

Mr. H. L. Mencken, in his essay on Dreiser, ob- 
serves of Indiana that "its literature, in the main, 
is a feeble romanticism for flappers and fat women." 
Mr. Tarkington's next "trifle" to appear between 
covers, the little one-act play designed for the study, 
Beauty and the Jacobin, brilliant, compact, clean cut, 
and finished in construction, is again colorful roman- 
ticism, but romanticism of a sort which evidently 
seeks to get quite away from being the kind of gum 
chewed with relish by the ladies mentioned by Mr. 
Mencken. The author calls his play "an interlude 
of the French Revolution"; it was revolutionary, 
too, in a way in marking an early step of revolt in 
the author's work. Mr. Tarkington himself speaks 
of it as a "turning point" in his writing. 

One of the reviewers of the book remarked that, 
"with memories of the fascinating charm of Beau- 
caire the reader seizes this little dramatic romance 
with eagerness, but lays it aside with a sigh — it is 



156 



Booth Tarkington 



not the same." It certainly is not. In Beaucaire 
the intention one feels to have been to make a story 
that would seem to be a little eighteenth century 
play, — rosy footlights reflected on the actors' faces, 
silver filagree work on a lady's fan. Beauty and the 
Jacobin breaks with the pretty, pretty kind of thing. 
There is a new quality in the texture of the writing, 
an apparent purpose to avoid write-y writing. The 
plot here springs directly from character, and the 
action of the piece is inevitable. Beauty and the 
Jacobin gives evidence of being the first conscious 
and determined, as it is the first consistent, effort 
of the author to leave the surface and work from the 
inside of his characters out. 

The women in the author's previous books may be 
said to have had about them only bits of reality, 
and then only incidentally and almost accidentally. 
(And, of course, there had been only bits, too, of a 
man in the men.) The marvelously beautiful, im- 
perious, selfish, conscienceless Eloise, who lives for 
those brief moments in which she is under the lime- 
light of publicity, one of three "emigrants" in the 
time of the Terror on the point of flight to England 
when overtaken in a garret in Boulogne by a com- 
missioner of the committee of public safety, — this 
proud, cold, treacherous fury of a lady is the first 
definite appearance of any real interest of the au- 
thor's in a woman in a book — in the substance of 



Booth Tarkington 157 

which women (some women), and not dreams, are 
composed. She is the Beauty, a type "not made by 
the sumptuous sculpture alone, but by a very peculiar 
arrogance — not in the least arrogance of mind." To 
her the most interesting thing about a rose-bush has 
been that she, Eloise d'Anville, could smell it. 
"Moonlight becomes important when it falls upon 
her face; sunset is worthy when she grows rosy in 
it." And though, of course, there is only a bit of 
her given, it is all real enough — a bit of the Nar- 
cissa woman, the breed which so curiously Mr. Tark- 
ington has come to be inspired to make his particular 
prey. Eloise d'Anville is the mother of the flirt, 
Cora Madison, and of the two very real sisters-in-law 
in The Turmoil — though the sisters-in-law are not 
Narcissas like Cora. 

The whole of the little drama is scintillant with 
wit, delicate, and at times brilliant and somewhat 
Shavian, which flashes out poignantly against the 
sombreness of its background. Mr. Tarkington's 
new implement, his detective-lantern, is flashed on 
the character of the Beauty in the duel of wits be- 
tween her and her captor, the Jacobin; she who has 
espoused the cause of the Republic, has given to it 
her fortune, and is sure that her name will protect 
her and her cousins, two proscribed nobles, a brother 
and sister, who, taking her under her protest, are 
fleeing for their lives disguised as peasants, and that 



158 Booth Tarhington 

the republic is so grateful for what she has done 
that it will grant them any favor she asks; he, "a 
man wise enough to make a study of women," for 
reasons of his own incited to malice against her; a 
dialogue of wit, keen intelligence, stern purpose on 
his side, and of belief in herself on hers. In the 
scintillating, scathing, and adroitly turned satire of 
the Jacobin some very apt things are said about the 
"soulless beauty." And in the novel denouement 
most ingeniously the punishment fits the crime. 



VII 

THERE was a German lad, one of these 
psychologists, or perhaps he was a phil- 
osopher (I don't, at the moment, recollect 
his name, but doubtless you will recall it), who, 
several years ago, "up" and wrote a book in which he 
classified womankind as of two general types, the 
maternal type and the courtesan type. Shortly after 
he delivered himself of this gift to scientific thought 
he went mad, and a bit later (I believe) committed 
suicide, — but that was his concern, not ours here. 
One can fancy Mr. Tarkington (though, with evi- 
dent astonishment at the suggestion, he indignantly 
denies this "nut" — as he savagely calls the poor 
German — as the source of his inspiration), one can 
fancy him, all aglow with the arresting idea, rising 
from this (more or less) philosophical volume 
straightway to do the thing in fiction in The Flirt; 
that startlingly probing, gleamingly brilliant, de- 
liciously malicious study of a heartless coquette, a 
flame of enchantment, effervescent young sorceress 
whose diet was excitement, the Narcissa woman, 
Cora Madison, with her Cinderella foil, home-keep- 
ing sister Laura. The rather flippant title of flirt 
is (to me) annoying because it does scant justice to 

159 



160 Booth Tarhington 

this young woman, and seems a pale, colorless, in- 
adequate sort of word beside her personified heart- 
lessness. A specialist in nervous diseases might 
describe Cora (in fact, I believe one such did so 
describe her in a letter to the author) as a case of 
incipient Narcissism. 

Some of the reviewers (probably wanting their 
Mr. Tarkington sunny as of old) distastefully spoke 
of The Flirt, as unpleasant, and the book (I have 
heard) never "sold," and even (it is said in the 
"trade") adversely affected the advance sale of the 
author's two following books. It would have been 
perfectly easy to have made The Flirt a popular 
book with perfect certainty: Cora could have re- 
pented and reformed and in the end everybody have 
been made glad, had the author not been quite 
earnestly bent upon being an artist who set himself 
to portray the insides of a certain type of person. 
Of course, Cora is unpleasant, that precisely is the 
pleasant thing about her. And anyone who has 
had a keen experience of her kind should find a 
kind of Penrodian satisfaction of revenge in his 
recognition of the fact that Mr. Tarkington has 
got this particular type of woman "down cold." 
The working of Cora's mind is amazingly real. 
Her domination of the gentle household by her vio- 
lent nervous collapses, her fury at the "selfishness" 
of others, her quick recovery from her hysterical 



Booth Tarkington 161 

fits which leave no effect upon her, but which 
wreck everyone about her, her revealing of her in- 
nate vulgarity in moments of excitement (as in her 
damning her lover in the scene of the great tan- 
trums), and her frenzy at the thought (which is the 
thing that most strikes her) that she has been "made 
a fool of" in the situation into which she has got 
herself: all this is done with a scientific relish for 
character. Cora's belief, too, after having caused 
her father to suffer a stroke of paralysis, that he is 
"all right," is another stroke that "rings the bell." 

The story paints, also, one of Mr. Tarkington's 
most excellent genre pictures, the little life of the 
domestic circle of the Madisons in Capital City, 
"that smoky illuminant of our great central levels"; 
a gentle family in rather straitened circumstances, 
so much so that summer vacations are a thing un- 
dreamed; a guest at dinner presents crucial prob- 
lems; and no amount of ingenious refurbishing can 
make the family wardrobe otherwise than shabby, 
— all with the exception of Cora. We have again, 
most happily, Mr. Tarkington's Miss Austenish eye, 
which, figuratively speaking, sees in the occasion of 
a bad egg for breakfast the inception of a divorce. 
When Cora desires guests to dinner, they invariably 
stay, regardless of the panic wrought in the kitchen. 
Over rickety furniture and crackling walls (the house 
of the Madisons was, too, one without a bath) she 



162 Booth Tarkington 

casts the glamour of her rose-like beauty; and, un- 
troubled by the knowledge that mother and sister 
are patiently slaving at household tasks, and father 
racking his brains to know how he is to pay for the 
new party dress that must be finished for next 
Thursday, she sets the standard of taste in dress 
for the community; and through endless, idle hours 
she is complacently willing to shed the light of her 
beauty upon anything and everything masculine that 
comes her way. Such is the setting of a chronicle 
of family jars precipitated for the most part by that 
luxuriant forerunner of Penrod, Cora's small brother, 
Hedrick the Pest, domestic savage, who is the only 
one with the intellectual courage to see through his 
sister, and who won't "stand for" her at all; Hedrick, 
handsome, shabby, dirty, aged about thirteen, vo- 
ciferous of tongue, impudent of phrase, maddeningly 
tantalizing by the devilish ingenuity with which he 
breaks in upon "Cora-lee's" side-piazza t£te-a-t£tes 
with ambiguous innuendoes; and whose having been 
"kissed by an idiot" is the occasion of much Ches- 
tertonian mirth in the book. Hedrick (with the most 
flagrantly jilted of Cora's suiters, Ray Vilas) is the 
chorus, the critical eye, necessary to reveal the 
monstrous nature of his sister, but, unlike the villain 
of the piece, Mr. Corliss, he is mighty far from being 
merely a device to that end. The Flirt, Mr. Tark- 
ington confesses; was the first of his books that 



Boo'h Tarkington 163 

Riley liked, as, he says, Riley's artistic conscience 
"wouldn't let him." Hedrick, however, captured 
Riley completely, and he liked every book of the 
author's that followed. 

Here, as throughout his books, Mr. Tarkington's 
hitting off of manners is seasoned with much criti- 
cism of architecture. Indeed, a very fair little 
critical manual of the evolution of domestic archi- 
tecture, and garden ornament, in the Middle West 
might be made of excerpts here and there from Mr. 
Tarkington's stories. In Capitol City we find our- 
selves in contact with a past, with a city which has 
had time to shift its architectural enslavement from 
mansard and cupola to the gables and jig-saw dec- 
orations of Queen Anne, and thence to more varied 
if not more sensible fashions: "The Goth, the Tudor, 
and the Tuscan had harried the upper reaches to 
a turmoil attaining its climax in a howl or two from 
the Spanish Moor." It is in one of the mansard 
survivals that Mr. Corliss, returning to his native 
city after many years abroad, finds the high product 
of civilization, Cora Madison; but the herd of cast- 
iron deer that once guarded the lawns of such houses 
as this, "standing sentinel to all true gentry"; 
whither were they fled? "In his boyhood, one 
specimen betokened a family of position and af- 
fluence; two, one on each side of the front walk, 
spoke of a noble opulence; two and a fountain were 



164 Booth Tarkington 

overwhelming." And every here and there in The 
Flirt one perceives the smoke of the oncoming 
Turmoil, the "long, gray smoke-plume crossing the 
summer sky" and which dropped "an occasional 
atom of coal" upon Mr. Corliss's white coat. No 
good burgher ever complained of the smoke or of 
the /'journalistic uprising" which awakened him — 
simultaneously with thousands of fellow-sufferers — 
at about half -after five on Sunday morning: 

Over the town, in these early hours, rampaged 
the small venders of the manifold sheets: local papers 
and papers from greater cities, hawker succeeding 
hawker with yell upon yell and brain-piercing shrill- 
ings in unbearable cadences. . . . The people bore 
it, as in winter they bore the smoke that injured 
their health, ruined their linen, spoiled their com- 
plexions, forbade all hope of beauty and comfort in 
their city, and destroyed the sweetness of their 
homes and of their wives. It is an incredibly pa- 
tient citizenry and exalts its persecutors. 

The Flirt throughout has a good deal of distinc- 
tion as an interpretive criticism of the social scene 
as presented in the Middle Western city which is its 
setting. Mr. James probably would have liked 
particularly the reflective picture of the dance to 
which Cora and Laura go; Cora, radiant-eyed, in 
high bloom, and exquisite from head to foot in a 
shimmering white dancing-dress, a glittering cres- 
cent fastening the silver fillet that bound her vivid 



Booth Tarkington 165 

hair; Laura in her made-over black lace dress. 
"Most of the people at this dance had known one 
another as friends, or antagonists, or indifferent ac- 
quaintances, for years, and in such an assembly 
there are always two worlds, that of the women and 
that of the men. Each has its own vision, radically 
different from that of the other; but the greatest 
difference is that the men are unaware of the other 
world, only a few of them — usually queer ones like 
Ray Vilas — vaguely perceiving that there are two 
visions, while all the women understand both per- 
fectly. The men splash about on the surface; the 
women keep their eyes open under water. Or, the 
life of the assembly is like a bright tapestry: the 
men take it as a picture and are not troubled to 
know how it is produced; but the women are the 
weavers." And the book abounds in witty dia- 
logue, which everywhere most ingeniously furthers 
the movement of the story. 

The story, the plot, is again the trouble, the one 
element of The Flirt open to questioning criticism. 
One does not feel that the plot was introduced for 
the sake of a plot, on the other hand one may even 
be inclined to suspect that it was a nuisance to the 
author, as it certainly is to the reader whose whole 
attention is keen on the Mephistophelean diagnosis 
of Cora's character. But some sort of a mechanism 
was required to exhibit in all its paces the utterly 



166 Booth Tarkington 

selfish nature of Cora's sex instinct and the effect 
of such a character as hers — that it destroys every- 
one with whom it comes into contact — and so the 
author cooked up his Basilicata oil fields flimflam. 
Doubtless something violent, something more or less 
melodramatic, was required; but Ray Vilas's killing 
himself might have been made to suffice. The 
swindling scheme of a fictitious tract of rich oil 
wells in the heel of Italy, belonging to a non-existent 
Neapolitan prince, eager to finance a company on a 
large scale, and unwilling to admit his fellow-coun- 
trymen to the secret, seems pretty transparent, too, 
(and unnecessarily wild and romantic) though it is 
true that it is frequently surprising what bait people 
in real life will "bite" on. A duel between Cora and 
an expert in the same line is effective and no doubt 
indispensable, but in the suspicious sleekness of word 
and manner of Corliss, who has acquired, through 
long years of foreign travel, a certain mannerism, a 
subtle grace of body and Gallic flattery of speech 
that dazzle Cora with the charm of the exotic and 
the unknown, the perspicuous reader early scents 
the touch of the traditional stage villain in him. 
And the meandering about the scene, in places in- 
tolerably prolonged, of Mr. Pryor, that plain citizen, 
who was "a tiptop spotter for the government" 
(and of his grotesque and — as far as I can see — 
quite superfluous daughter), has the effect of halting 



Booth Tarhington 167 

the very real adventure of the pursuit of the character 
of Cora to make way for some rather meretricious 
adventure business. The reader's entertainment in 
the case of a whole company of the characters in 
The Flirt, Cora, Laura, Hedrick, father and mother 
Madison (though perhaps they are a bit over gen- 
tle), Wade Trumbell, plodding, prosperous business 
man, whose chief pleasure is to hear himself talk, is 
what Mr. James spoke of as the pleasure of recogni- 
tion; while the Mr. Pry or doings is a horse of the 
opposite color: there we have the kind of fiction in 
which the entertainment is designed to result from 
mystery and surprise. Mr. Pryor is a straw-stuffed 
figure; and his appearance among the burghers of 
Capitol City is in effect very much as though you 
should go to a play by Oscar Wilde and, after a scene 
or so, on should come a pirate fitted out with a spy- 
glass and cutlass. 

So, in The Flirt, we see a trace of the glowing ro- 
manticist yet remains in the searing satirist into 
which Mr. Tarkington is emerging, and so also re- 
mains a good measure of the generous warmth of 
kindly heart of the author of The Gentleman from 
Indiana. Offset against this unpleasant and ill-fated 
pair, the flirt and her rascal, are Laura and Richard, 
whose story, in so far as it can be detached from that 
of Cora and Corliss, is, as some reviewer observed, 
simple and romantic enough to have been conceived 



168 Booth Tarkington 

by the author of Little Women. . . . Mr. Tarkington 
says that he "might" be able to re-read parts of The 
Flirt; as it was written only five years ago it still 
seems "possible." 

The new Tarkington, Doctor Tarkington the vivi- 
sectionist, certainly comes wholly into view in the 
author's extraordinary boy cycle, which began with 
Hedrick Madison. There is an unconscionable 
amount of boy stuff published right along, but only 
a few of the boys in books have genuine boy in- 
sides. The classics are soon numbered; Aldrich's 
Story of a Bad Boy, William Allen White's Boyville 
Stories, Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 
Mr. Howells' The Flight of Pony Baker, and Stephen 
Crane's few sketches, these are the authentic boy 
pictures that most readily come to mind. There are, 
of course, different kinds of boys, as there are dif- 
ferent kinds of men and women. Some boys are 
"little gentlemen," like Georgie Bassett. And some 
men are old women. But there are certain animal 
juices in boys which make them distinct among their 
species; and since the advent of Tom Sawyer and 
Huckleberry Finn the boy in the boy nature cer- 
tainly has not been so vividly portrayed as in the 
spectacle of Penrod Schofield and Sam Williams 
going about their affairs. I The Penrod stories are, 
of course, of the genre of Huckleberry Finn, which is 
mainly to say that Penrod is an intensely American 



Booth Tarkington 169 

boy. It's a curious thing about boy literature: as 
the boy, like the man, is an animal distinct from all 
others, so the American boy, like the North American 
Indian, it would seem, is of a race like no other. An 
elaborate autobiographic account of the boyhood of 
the hero has been a very pronounced feature of re- 
cent English fiction; but the youthful Englishman, 
generally studious and with his thoughts more upon 
Oxford than upon a show exhibiting a dog part 
alligator, certainly does not seem to be the cheerful 
incarnation of natural instinct which was born along 
the Mississippi River, and later, in somewhat better 
clothes and a rather more advanced social environ- 
ment, flourished in Hoosierdom. 

Hedrick Madison unconsciously, and without 
"thinking it out," recognized the naturalness of 
Cora's seizing upon the deadliest weapon against him 
that came to her hand. Mr. Tarkington's interpre- 
tation of the creature, boy, has a weird quality; and, 
one has an uncanny feeling, his studies in boy psy- 
chology call for some sort of a pathological explana- 
tion. In effect his analysis of the utterly mad workings 
of the boy's mind and the throbbing of his inflamed 
nerves is as if a boy himself had suddenly become 
endowed with the faculty of thinking it out aloud. 
That is, the author's interpretation of the boy, mov- 
ing about in what is to him the cataclysm of life, 
does not so much seem to be the work of a mind 



170 Booth Tarkington 

observing him from without, as it appears to be a 
voice from within explaining the matter, the voice 
of a boy uniquely gifted with the power of self- 
analysis. It is as if the author had a device in his 
head like the plumbing giving hot and cold water 
to a bath-tub, and as if he could at will turn off the 
stream of mature thinking and turn on the boy 
thinking. And to recapture the sensations of twelve 
or of seventeen is exactly what the normal adult 
mind cannot do. Mr. Tarkington's earlier books 
might have been produced by any brilliant young 
writer had he happened to possess this particular 
author's personality, but for the production of his 
boy stories something else was required, something 
for which I really know no other name than genius, 
though that is a deuce of a word to have to use. 
However, to talk you have to use what words we have. 
And a genius, according to the most modern theories, 
bears a relationship to the so-called trance medium: 
he goes into a sort of trance, and produces work 
which no other person can produce by the mere ap- 
plication of skill and labor. The author of Penrod 
and William Baxter certainly is not as other men; 
he commands some occult power. And the joke of 
this mystery is that Mr. Tarkington says boy stories 
are the "easiest" things to write there are. He can 
"do any of them" in a day and a half. And he 
thinks that "anybody could do it." 



Booth Tarkington 171 

While there is no deficiency of zest in Mr. Tark- 
ington's analysis of the adult character, he seems to 
go on a kind of a debauch of insight when his mind 
takes up the subject of juvenile doings; and he be- 
comes possessed of almost demoniac inspirations for 
hidden truth. He is positively gory in his relish of 
the exercise of his uncanny power. Like the oft- 
celebrated fat boy of Pickwick, he seems to exult 
inordinately in making our flesh creep by his amaz- 
ing and incomprehensible clairvoyance. He appears 
to become intoxicated by the easy exercise of his 
singular gift, and piles performance upon perform- 
ance, each one in stunning effect mounting beyond 
the last. His small boy is a naive and spontaneous 
savage; he is insane; and, at heart, a criminal. He 
has "a highly developed capacity for pain"; and 
lives largely in a state of intense agony; he broods 
profoundly and his brightest thought is revenge; and 
his humor is indeed "sometimes almost intrusive." 
His fervent love is a pure passion, honest, innocent, 
a high exultation, an anguish, and a pain. His life is 
a keen adventure, a boisterous comedy, and a fearful 
tragedy. And the wonder of the thing is that your 
immense entertainment consists of a continuous repe- 
tition of shocks of recognition of the veracity of the 
whole affair. Why is it all so outrageously funny? 
The most striking thing about the humor of the 
Penrod stories and of Seventeen is the effect of the 



172 Booth Tarkingtoii 

complete absence on the author's part of any effort 
to be comic. There is nothing at all of the Peck's 
Bad Boy kind of spirit. Penrod and Sam are but 
automatons of instinct, meaning no evil. They are 
never "bad." They are something which is not their 
fault; they are historic. When they throw a stone 
at the fleeing horse this is a survival of primeval 
man, who must take every chance to get his dinner, 
a response to an impulse thousands and thousands 
of years old — "an impulse founded upon the primor- 
dial observation that whatever runs is likely to 
prove edible." The author is not like a man telling 
a funny story, but like a man bent with immense 
earnestness upon telling you the truth; he goes on 
with a perfectly straight face, solemnly, almost sav- 
agely, relating a lot of facts, while you very nearly 
cry with mirth. In this respect, in the absence in 
them of the jocose note, it might be argued that 
Penrod and Seventeen are superior to Tom Sawyer and 
Huckleberry Finn, as in those classics one is inclined 
to feel something of the air of the conscious humorist. 
In his boy stories Mr. Tarkington has got hold of 
a very striking style, a style which though very 
much a style is one that the reader who has a notion 
that "style" is something supplementary to, and dis- 
tinguishable from, matter, would probably regard 
(with approval) as no style at all. And it is largely 
because the style of these stories is, so to say, no 



Booth Tarhington 173 

style at all, no costume in which the thought is 
dressed, that it is so fine merely as style. It imposes 
no film of consciousness of itself between the mind of 
the reader and that of the writer, but is like a wire 
conductor carrying an electric current between the 
two. It is composed of a series of terse, absolutely 
clear, energetic statements, as direct and practical 
in effect as a market report in a trade journal. It is 
a medium designed for handling what the newspaper 
man terms "live news." Its distinction resides in 
its extraordinary clarity and its eye-opening energy 
of expression. Every word is the right shot to hit 
the bulls-eye. Altogether, it is in effect like a series 
of pistol-like concussions of thought. | At least, that 
is as well as I can analyze it. 

Nothing is more extraordinary than the element 
of personal equation. Though Seventeen immediately 
became one of the most popular books in the world, 
sundry persons have been reported, — always persons 
who had never themselves been hobbledehoys, — who 
could not see anything at all in it. I should myself 
be tempted to pronounce it about the funniest book 
in the language. But you cannot altogether explain 
the fascination exercised by Mr. Tarkington's clair- 
voyance into primary natures on the ground that 
many readers have been boys; many readers have 
not been dogs or colored men. And the ticking of 
the soul of Duke and of Genesis holds one almost 



174 Booth Tarkington 

as spell bound as the revealed heart of Penrod and of 
William Baxter. 

Round Mr. Tarkington's luminary, the boy, al- 
ways revolve his natural satellites the dog and the 
darkey. The fates which so well looked after, and 
catered to, the talent of this author saw to it that 
he was born in not only a Middle Western city, a 
sort of junction of the manners of the east and of 
the west, but a city which is practically a Southern 
city as well; where the barbers, the coachmen, the 
nurse-maids, and the waiters are "colored." Every 
native of Indianapolis has been f amiliar from infancy 
with the negro man of all work who cuts the grass 
and sprinkles the lawn. Mr. Tarkington's series 
plumbing the boy from twelve to seventeen also has 
the effect of running the whole gamut of the career 
of the negro servitor, of presenting the seven ages of 
colored man. His strange life passes in review from 
the time of the aboriginal Herman and Verman, 
through the heyday of the colored manhood of Gen- 
esis, and takes a look in at the declining light in the 
"Pappy" of Genesis, with a "cat'rack" in his "lef" 
eye, whose "rickaleekshum," of his wives and other 
things, extends back only to when he was "'bout" 
fifty. But, feat upon feat, Mr. Tarkington, in his 
lust for mimicry not content with the fantastic lan- 
guage of Herman, makes Verman tongue-tied! 

As a member of what might be called the dog 



Booth Tarhington 175 

school of writers Mr. Tarkington is decidedly "dif- 
ferent." We have a large and continually increasing 
body of dog literature, of which Bob, Son of Battle, 
The Bar Sinister, and The Call of the Wild are the 
classic examples. And this literature is almost wholly 
the extreme of sentimental romanticism. The dog 
in fiction is nearly always a glamorous hero. Usually 
he is a very famous character — everybody in Alaska 
(or wherever the scene of his exploits is) has heard 
of him. How he became the leader of the pack, or 
saved somebody's life, or flagged a train on the 
brink of the broken bridge, or put out a fire with his 
teeth, or made good in some spectacular way is the 
climax of a tale replete with thrills, and in which 
sobs over his sublime love of man are not spared. 
Mr. Tarkington stands somewhat solitary as a real- 
ist in the dog line, — as, you might say, the dog's 
George Gissing. There are no purple patches on his 
dogs. One very human thing about his dogs is that 
they are lowly, and humble. Duke's name "was un- 
descriptive of his person, which was obviously the 
result of a singular series of mesalliances. He wore 
a grizzled moustache and indefinite whiskers; he was 
small and shabby, and looked like an old postman." 
Clematis was a dog "that would have been recog- 
nized anywhere in the world as a colored person's 
dog. He was not a special breed of dog — though 
there was something rather houndlike about him — 



176 Booth Tarkington 

he was just a dog. His expression was grateful but 
anxious, and he was unusually bald upon the bosom, 
but otherwise whitish and brownish, with a gaunt, 
haunting face and no power to look anybody in the 
eye." Of course, there is Flopit, too; but Flopit, 
though aristocratic, is a simpleton. 

Dogs are sprinkled along in Mr. Tarkington's 
books in about the same proportion that, I guess, 
they are found in life. One can readily lay hand on 
a dog almost anywhere. Perhaps as good an ex- 
ample as another of the curious mental telepathy ap- 
parently existing between Mr. Tarkington and dogs 
is expressed in the Rupe Collins chapter of Penrod: 

Duke could chase a much bigger dog out of the 
Schofields' yard and far down the street. This might 
be thought to indicate unusual valour on the part of 
Duke and cowardice on that of the bigger dogs 
whom he undoubtedly put to rout. On the con- 
trary, all such flights were founded in mere super- 
stition, for dogs are even more superstitious than 
boys and colored people; and the most firmly estab- 
lished of all dog superstitions is that any dog — be he 
the smallest, feeblest in the world — can whip any 
trespasser whatsoever. ... A rat-terrier believes 
that on his home grounds he can whip an elephant. 

For the well proportioned world that they mirror, 
comparatively few cats are to be seen in Mr. Tark- 
ington's pages. Way back in The Gentleman from 



Booth Tarhington 177 

Indiana histrionically comical Wilkerson swung, as 
a sort of artistic pendulum, "an unhappy mongrel" 
dog at the tail of the column marching against the 
Cross Roads. This ancient animal was of Mr. Tark- 
ington's favorite dog color, yellow. The "fuzzy, 
white ball" which Miss Betty Carewe carried one 
morning in "a world all sunshine and green leaves" 
was, first, a pawn necessary to Fate, and, secondly, 
it was merely a water-color kitten in a sentimental 
water-color picture. Any former neglect of cats by 
this author, however, is completely atoned for in 
his history of that theatre of war which was the 
back yard of Penrod shared by Sam. There is a 
Cat worthy of — whom shall we say? — Zola? — no, 
Mr. Tarkington; such a villainous cat as has not 
elsewhere terrorized the readers of a book: Gipsy 
(its name in the days when it had a home), that 
cat "needlessly tall, powerful, independent, and mas- 
culine;" who wanted free air and free life, the lights, 
the lights, and the music; and who abandoned the 
bourgeoisie irrevocably, by going forth in a May 
twilight, carrying the evening beefsteak with him, 
and joining the underworld. 



VIII 



IT was, I suppose (looking back), in this way 
that I got started on the idea of writing this 
essay, in which I, at least, have found for the 
mind considerable of what one Quinney called "meat 
and gravy." 

I have made an extensive study of clubs. I col- 
lect clubs, as you may say; not in the sense that I 
belong to many, but in this: that I make it a point 
to possess with my mind the cosmopolitan variety 
I have seen. One of the most winning clubs, then, 
in my collection is one that I picked up, so to say, in 
Indianapolis, the University Club there. For one 
gracious thing it is housed in one of those mellow, 
old architectural piles, a type of old time mansion 
specimens of which are frequently found in Indiana, 
which connote to the reflective mind the period of 
the civil war, a house which in the sentiment of its 
effect is like to a gentleman of the old school; and it 
stands on the patrician and park-like North Meridian 
Street in a dainty little lawn. To the original two- 
story, red-brick building has been added a third 
story perfect in its recognition of the distinction of 
character of the original design. Within the high- 
ceilinged rooms of this simple, noble, one-time resi- 

178 



Booth Tarkington 179 

dence broods an atmosphere from out the past of 
old-fashioned culture. A much pleasanter place al- 
together, certainly more soothing, than the stately 
and mighty Reform Club. 

I was sitting in the University Club at Indian- 
apolis, reading the paper, when a voice of hoarse 
timbre and of unusual volume sounded out in the 
hall, and a young man with a good deal of some- 
thing about him entered the room. I know not 
exactly what name to put upon this something, per- 
haps you would call it " class." A young man in that 
he may have been anywhere between thirty-five and 
forty-five (or so). College chap kind of look. He 
was fashionably dressed and carried a handsome 
cane. Several persons who had been drowsing burst 
into hearty welcome; and there came instantly into 
the atmosphere an electric feeling of something un- 
usual going forward. In a hearty fashion the new- 
comer cordially returned all greetings. He had, ap- 
parently, just got back after an absence from the 
city. 

Seated presently, he had very much the effect, with 
his slouched attitude and his smart apparel, of a por- 
trait, So-and-So, Esq., that you might see at, say, the 
Montross Gallery. He was drawn into conversation 
by an elderly character nearby, whose appearance 
suggested an old-fashioned judge of a Circuit Court. 
This engagingly musty-looking person evidently con- 



180 Booth Tarhington 

sidered literature a suitable topic of conversation 
"with the young man, and he fell to a discussion of 
John Ruskin, of whom, it seemed, he was very fond. 
Now I felt that faint feeling at my stomach which 
I always feel whenever I expect that I am about to 
be awfully bored. I have never been able to read 
any of John Ruskin, and it has been my opinion 
that nobody does read him, except, possibly, elderly 
gentlemen who look like old-fashioned judges of Cir- 
cuit Courts. 

The hoarse, hearty, richly dressed young man, 
however, quite astonished me. He was not bored 
in the least. You might have thought (though I 
afterward learned that he "hates" John Ruskin) 
that John Ruskin had been meat and drink, wife 
and child, music and smoking tobacco to him 
throughout his life. The picturesque old codger 
with much deference frequently addressed the dash- 
ing young blade as "Mr. Tarkington." And this 
Mr. Tarkington was very keen, it appeared, on a 
matter which he continually named — art. jHe dis- 
coursed of rhythm, which, he insisted, was as much 
a property of prose as of verse. And he held that, 
commonly, critical judgment had little to do with the 
case: one liked or disliked an author according to 
the degree one vibrated, or did not vibrate, in sym- 
pathy with the rhythm of that author's writing. 
The rhythm of some authors was "congenial" to 



Booth Tarhington 181 

one, others not. "Well," I said to myself, "all this 
rather gets my goat!" 

You see, at that time I had somehow never pic- 
tured to myself Booth Tarkington as at heart torn 
by the anguishing problems of Flaubert. I had 
got it into my head that he was a "popular novelist," 
a society butterscotch, one who carried lightly a 
jolly bright talent. A deep sea monster, not exactly ! 
The thing about him, now that I had him before 
me, that particularly appalled me was his deadly 
earnestness. I don't know that I have ever seen a 
man who appeared to be more hell-bent, which is 
the only way that puts it exactly, on what he be- 
lieved to be so. 

Next (I don't remember just how he got to that 
subject) he "went for" Indianapolis. "Dirt, smoke 
and rotten politics," that was all it was. "I have 
a book now running in Harper's" he began. . . . 
"Then why do you come back here?" inquired the 
old gentleman, with, it must be confessed, some 
point. "To work!" was the searing reply. "I can 
work only in a dirty, dark, dull place." His house 
had been robbed three times within the last several 
weeks; you might think he was running "some kind 
of a home for burglars"; he had been held up at a 
pistol's point on his own block; a forest of telegraph 
poles had been planted before his door while he was 
away, — and the city's office holders were "playing 



182 Booth Tarkington 

checkers at the fire engine house." The hoarse 
young man appeared to be somewhat "sore." The 
admirer of Ruskin was advised, with a good deal of 
intensity, to read the book in Harper's 9 though, un- 
fortunately, it would probably not be much read 
here, and it was sadly emasculated by the require- 
ments of present-day publication. He was also in- 
formed in this connection that nothing was known 
about literature at universities, where old bones were 
dissected with profound solemnity. . . . My desire 
to talk with so spirited a creature was growing 
prodigiously. 

In a succinct note, in reply to my request to 
"meet" him, I was invited to call at the Tarking- 
ton homestead on North Pennsylvania Street. It's 
a fine way, I think, for a man to have his home, at 
the seat of his family, in the house of his father, and 
his father's fathers. I had some time to wait before 
the master of the house arrived; and I surveyed a 
curious sort of apartment whose conglomerate para- 
phernalia suggested that it might have been got 
together by Stanford White. It seems to me that 
there were things such as these there: huge, stone 
Italian mantels; massive, carven, gargoyle-like chairs; 
early primitive Italian painting; and a great deal of, 
I should say, that sort of thing. 

After a bit a fancy dog appeared (not a yellow 
dog, not at all a colored person's dog, but a large 



Booth Tarkington 183 

and aristocratic-looking, black poodle, shaven in some 
places and tufted in patches) and in its wake came 
Mr. Tarkington, in a sweater, I think, and got up as 
though for knocking about in the country. Directly 
following a hearty handshake, I was presented with 
the first of a succession of enormous cigarettes bear- 
ing in giant letters (for a cigarette) the initials 
"B. T." These paper-encased torpedoes their owner 
carried upright in his breast pocket, as you do cigars. 
Now, you might expect a strikingly humorous and 
abundantly witty writer to be rather a witty man 
in his talk; but, as far as I could make out, this par- 
ticular humorist, satirist, what you will, is so bloomin' 
sincere that he forgets all about scintillating when 
he talks. Standing on his hearth-rug before me, with 
his legs wide apart, his comedian's mask drooping 
forward like a bloom on its stalk, and standing so 
suggesting to my mind the idea of the master of 
some baronial hall, he gave me a lengthy and a 
rather dry lecture on the function of book reviews 
and the duties of reviewers, — reviewing being my 
calling. Mr. Tarkington is one of those authors 
who never read reviews of their own work; at least, 
he "tries" not to; but when they are sent to him by 
friends, and he has them in his hand, he "of course 
can't help it." f 

His acquaintance with reviews has apparently left 
him with the impression that his reviewers have 



184 Booth Tarkington 

seldom read the book. For a reviewer "to have 
read the book and have emerged with an intelligent 
impression of what the author was about, that is 
the important thing to the novelist and to the reader 
who wants the reviewer to give him some notion of 
the book," — "I should not put the novelist first!" 
says Mr. Tarkington. Such a review, one which 
"proves the understanding and thoroughness of the 
reviewer," is as "good" a review as one may hope- 
fully ask for. Evidently he has been much exas- 
perated by reviewers "blandly stating things with 
complete incorrectness, thus demonstrating the most 
hurried skimming." Such a reviewer has "flound- 
ered, shirked his job, and then tried to cover bad 
work with dishonesty." "A reviewer should under- 
stand that he reviews himself also, shouldn't he?" 
Once, it appears, a reviewer misquoted a word in a 
line of one of Mr. Tarkington's books. And Mr. 
Tarkington "suggested" that "a painful and rest- 
less sensitiveness to words is as necessary to the 
reviewer as to the novelist." 

It so falls out that I have lived a good part of my 
life among painters, professors, newspaper men, jour- 
nalists, poets, publishers' literary advisers, book sel- 
lers, and writers of books. With the exception of 
the painters, of such a man, for instance, as John 
H. Twachtman, I think I have never heard any one 
so frequently refer to "the artist" as did Mr. Tark- 



Booth Tarkington 185 

ington as to an ideal. How do wars affect literature? 
as the interviewer now continually asks. With Mr. 
Tarkington the matter altogether comes back to the 
nature of the artist. Regardless of wars the artist 
will go on giving expression to himself and his re- 
action to the things about him, as he has ever done. 
And so on. 

And he told me a number of stories, like a com- 
mercial traveller in a smoking car or an after-dinner 
speaker. "Mr. Tark-ing-ton " (as with a sonorous 
sound he names himself), said the doctor, and so 
and so. And then he said to the doctor such and 
such. Like that! I wish I could remember the one 
about George Ade and an English actor in China or 
South Africa or some such place. As to that dirt, 
smoke and rotten politics business, it is those who 
really care for this land whose wrath is toward her 
now. Twenty, thirty, or more years ago this city 
was a pleasant place in which to live. Our fathers 
suffered, and toiled, and builded and bled, that we 
should come into our inheritance — for this, a tur- 
moil ! The outstanding features of this striking man, 
I felt to be a remarkable energy of feeling, and a 
quick and generous sympathy with anything like 
"hard lines" in the situation of another. 

I had recently "busted down," largely as the re- 
sult of a too continuous application of mind. Mr. 
Tarkington's ready and patently genuine concern as 



186 Booth Tarkington 

to this affair of mine somewhat startled me. No, 
certainly, I could not stand such a routine grind. 
(I knew this man understood the "artist.") And he 
told me how after a round at writing he was "limp." 
I recalled Mr. Nicholson's description of his (Mr. 
Tarkington's) manner of working. Lock himself up 
in a room two or three days running; believed he 
slept a few hours in the night on a couch there; had 
a little food brought in to him now and then; re- 
fused to budge from the spot until he was spent. 
There pops into one's head Mr. Brownell's saying, 
in a beautiful figure, of Hawthorne writing The Scar- 
let Letter that "he shut himself up and wrestled con- 
tinuously with the angel of his inspiration till he had 
conquered." 

Then I began to find that when Mr. Tarkington 
writes you a letter, or at least when he writes me a 
letter, he writes just like the correspondent of a 
business house, — though, we know, he never had a 
job anywhere in his life. Except that his hand- 
writing is awful. And apparently he does all his 
letter writing by hand. His capital "I"s are all 
capital "Y"s. And he signs himself simply "N. B. 
Tarkington," which is an admirable thing to do, I 
think, because it has a practical, no-monkey-business 
sound, and nothing of the "J. Shameous O' Field" 
literary name kind of thing about it. His epistolary 
statements I have found all very earnest, as though 



Booth Tarkington 187 

he had his nose (that noble nose of the humorist) 
very close to the paper. 

Monsieur Beaucaire, according to Mr. Frederic 
Taber Cooper writing in 1911, "immediately, once 
and for all, defined Mr. Tarkington 's proper sphere 
and limitations." The hoodwinked critic was, very 
painstakingly, surveying the talent of the author of 
eight books then published, which concluded with 
The Guest of Quesnay; and thus, of course, was at a 
very great disadvantage. It is entertaining to note 
that it then seemed that that "dainty bit of fictional 
artistry," Beaucaire, "proved" Mr. Tarkington "one 
of those writers whose stories, whenever and wher- 
ever laid, should carry with them something of the 
'once-upon-a-time' atmosphere, — the fictional at- 
mosphere of the story that aims frankly to enter- 
tain." Further, "it reduced at once to an absurdity 
the bare idea of Mr. Tarkington's ever again at- 
tempting to write a novel opening with such prosaic 
actuality as 'There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in 
Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travelers, glancing 
from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to 
interior upholstery.' " 

It is perhaps something more than a simple coin- 
cidence that Mr. Tarkington's most mature effort, 
a far cry indeed from a dainty bit of fictional artistry 
and a once-upon-a time atmosphere, should hark 
straight back to his maiden volume, and begin: 



188 Booth Tarkington 

"There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open 
country, a dirty and wonderful city nestling dingily 
in the fog of its own smoke." Apparently the idea 
was to do the same picture over again in different 
colors, and this time, with increased knowledge and 
power, to do it right. The keynote* however, struck 
in each of these two opening, or "topic," sentences 
is distinctly opposite one from the other. If there 
was any element of combat in the earlier volume 
(and an article in praise of the Middle West which 
the author contributed to a magazine at about that 
time suggests that there may have been) the resent- 
ment, in defense of his own, was directed against a 
sense of superiorness felt in the East. In the second 
case not a champion is needed, but a critic of the 
"dirty city nestling dingily in the heart of its own 
smoke." It will also be perceived that his second 
opening sentence is a much better sentence than the 
first, a quicker, more compact and nervous "prose." 
And it immediately proceeds to a tone not before 
felt, with anything like this intensity, anywhere in 
the author's work. There is a grim ring, resonant of 
pomp and panoply, to the firmly marching passages 
that follow. The air is lowering, ominous, and as 
the pages turn, the reader feels something of an epic 
roll to the lines, a Thackerayan rumble in the dis- 
tance, a reminiscence of Vanity Fair with Waterloo 
looming beyond. The ground trembles with the 



Booth Tarkington 189 

force of moral indignation. The effect is incontest- 
ably impressive, and the genuineness and fervor of 
the inspiration voiced in chapter one are indubitable. 
Has this inspiration the vitality to drive straight to 
the end? 

In considering The Turmoil it is interesting, if 
nothing more, to remember Mr. Tarkington's 
preacher grandfather, "one of the fathers of In- 
diana Methodism," as a quaint old volume, Indiana 
Methodism, by a brother pioneer preacher (and a 
grandfather, by the way, of the present writer), calls 
him. The Reverend Joseph Tarkington contributed 
to this volume his own sketch of his life and times. 
And there are moments in the sonorous roll of the 
righteous sentences of this distinguished gentleman of 
another day when he reveals something of the bright 
humor of his celebrated grandson. In his account, 
for instance, of a "camp meeting" to which he went 
as a child "to cry for mercy," he confesses that, 
"It had been my desire that the Lord would bless 
me in private, and in a peculiar manner, and my 
prayers had been directed to this end; but before 
the blessing came, I was willing to receive it in any 
manner, and on any terms." — A line, one recognizes, 
which might easily have been written by the nov- 
elist. 

For the most part, however, this narrative is a 
story of the rugged school in which moral fibre was 



190 Booth Tarkington 

welded. Young Joseph Tarkington went on his wed- 
ding tour, not to Niagara and to the White Moun- 
tains, nor to Lake Superior or to California, but to 
Conference. And if lithe humor and a command of 
the written word flowed in the line of the Tarkington 
blood, so (as one sees in the "morals" of Mr. Tarking- 
ton's stories) did a didactical strain of a lofty ethical 
ideal and a strong sense of moral values. And what- 
ever may have been the source of the note of a sound, 
old oaken philosophy which may have been per- 
ceived growing more and more perceptible in Mr. 
Tarkington's work, the "Hoosier Olympian" (in Mr. 
Nicholson's happy phrase descriptive of the rugged 
pioneers who planted the garden in the Hoosier 
wilderness) who was his grandsire — one of the old 
line Indianaians nurtured on the pap of the Bible, 
the spirit of the Civil War, and rousing Indiana 
"preaching" — might have delivered in another form 
from his pulpit (had he suddenly returned) the thesis 
of The Turmoil. Further, Mr. Tarkington's intimacy 
with the Scriptures will have been remarked in many 
an apt allusion here and there throughout his work, 
and an echo of the Biblical rhythm noted in an oc- 
casional turn of phrase. And as The Turmoil unrolls 
it is impossible to fail to perceive that the beat of the 
style is Old Testament. 

The Turmoil^ which, later, Mr. Tarkington felt 
called upon to "explain" in his magazine article 



Booth TarJcington 191 

"Vreedersburgh — The City Beautiful," bears an 
amusing analogy to Gulliver's Travels, in that it has 
been very widely enjoyed under something very like, 
presumably, a misapprehension. The savage Dean's 
gospel of hatred, his testament of woe — upon which 
he expended the treasures of his wit, and into which 
he instilled the concentrated essence of his rage at 
the animal man — has become a child's book, and has 
been read with wonder and delight as a fascinating 
fairy tale by generations of innocents. No one could 
take Mr. Winston Churchill's A Far Country — which, 
curiously enough, appeared almost simultaneously 
with The Turmoil — for anything other than what it 
is: an indictment of modern American conditions in 
the commercial life of big cities. Mr. Tarkington's 
novel of flamingly didactic inspiration, his unsparing 
diagnosis of the great American disease of the love 
of Bigness, has been labeled by one impressionable 
reviewer thus: "No more beautiful story of young 
love has ever been conceived." Naive testimony, 
at any rate, to the author's potency as a novelist, 
whatever he may have "on his chest" in the way of 
a "message." 

Booksellers and librarians have confessed to hav- 
ing been puzzled to account for some sort of hyp- 
notic quality apparently possessed by The Turmoil. 
It has had, such persons state, an effect little short 
of unheard of before. It has been given to all whose 



192 Booth Tarkington 

request was for "a good story," and instead of the 
usual number of such persons coming back with the 
familiar remark that that book was "no good," and 
the threatening command not to give them any 
such book again, while yet others were highly pleased; 
in this case the verdict was unanimous, and the re- 
sponse was a general call for another book "like 
that." These highly satisfied customers comprised 
many varieties of type, with perhaps "flappers and 
fat women" predominating. Though it is said that 
business men, too, probably "young business men," 
like the lampooned Roscoe and Jim Sheridan, found 
the book very agreeable. Why they thought it was so 
"good," doubtless very few of all those who enjoyed 
it could have said. And Professor Phelps' critical 
dictum that it "has proven that the author can write 
a novel full of cerebration without losing any of his 
charm," does not, it may be felt, get much forrader. 
Probably the simplest explanation of the effect so 
universally felt of its being such a good book is that 
The Turmoil has first, last, and all the time, the 
nervous vitality of life. It has this to a degree far 
and away beyond any other of Mr. Tarkington's 
books. A sense of the vibration of the press of life 
from all four sides is conveyed in a measure beyond 
that to be felt in any other American novel that can 
readily be named. In its signal presentation of the 
brunt of American life to-day, The Turmoil, one is 



Booth Tarkington 193 

tempted to say, is the most successful approxima- 
tion in sight to the thing prophesied in that vener- 
able mirage, the Great American Novel. 

The Turmoil is a thoroughly modem form of a 
very old kind of story, the Parable of the old Jewish 
literature. It tells of a City, where wealth is loved 
better than cleanliness, where the citizens have lost 
their old neighborliness and simplicity in their rush 
for money, where Bigness is the only god known; a 
place where honor, poetry, truth and beauty are 
almost forgotten, where law is a joke, the rulers 
venial, and the citizens heartless. It is a writing on 
the wall of the City, a voice speaking against the 
crassly materialistic spirit which animates this epit- 
ome of our urban civilization, against the spirit 
which finds garish and noisy expression in municipal 
"slogans," municipal "boosting" and municipal ad- 
vertisement, against that sort of cheap and unnat- 
ural civic enthusiasm which is vulgar (in the modern 
sense of the word) . And in the personality of Sheri- 
dan, something big, powerful, and ugly, that must 
have something behind it, some meaning, the Parable 
dramatizes * ' the city incarnate." " It was Narcissism 
in him to love the city so well; he saw his reflection 
in it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich, 
strong, and unquenchably optimistic." 

In its outline the story goes back to a time before 
the parable. Here we have the simple fairy story of 



194 Booth Tarkington 

the King and his three sons — the great financier 
Sheridan and Bibbs and his two elder brothers. In 
accordance with the ancient tradition, the youngest 
son is an "ugly duckling" and turns out to be a 
swan. One of the brothers dies: "Standing in the 
black group under gaunt trees at the cemetery, three 
days later, Bibbs unwillingly let an old, old thought 
become definite in his mind: the sickly brother had 
buried the strong brother, and Bibbs wondered how 
many million times that had happened since men 
first made a word to name the sons of one mother." 
The other brother becomes a drunkard, and Bibbs, 
made whole and strong, wins the high-born lady's 
love — but does he five happy ever after? A re- 
viewer in the New York Times has poetically found 
in Bibbs more than Sheridan's son: he is, it may be, 
the Soul of Man. And the story, thus, is of the 
conflict between the City and the Soul, the City 
striving to crush the Soul or else to mould it into its 
own hideous image. And "the Soul triumphs by 
the aid of — well, what is Mary Vertrees? Beauty, 
or Truth, or Love?" But the soul of Bibbs (though 
he, being after all the son of his father, had a good 
deal of the obstinacy of the elder mule) certainly 
does not triumph; and the story, many of its readers 
doubtless would be surprised to hear, does not have 
a "happy ending." There is no evidence that Bibbs 
ever became a great business man, — he did well 



Booth Tarkington 195 

enough to please his father, who was astonished that 
(in Dr. Johnson's figure about the dancing dog) he 
could walk on his hind legs at all. There is, further, 
a very strong suggestion that the thesis of the story 
is completed by the implication that much brains are 
not required to be a business man, particularly if 
you have behind you as much money as the sons of 
Sheridan had behind them. We leave Bibbs with 
the prospect of becoming a fair business man, and 
nothing more, before him. 

The author of The Gentleman from Indiana ex- 
pressed a feeling, perhaps a boyish feeling, that 
Indiana people were sane, kind and without mean 
and little traits; and, as to that, many native In- 
dianaians of his generation would now say (I have 
occasion to believe) that he was rather right about 
it, — about the "old stock," at least. Then, in this 
"homelike" place, "no one was very rich; few were 
very poor; the air was clean, and there was time 
to live." But: 

In the souls of the burghers there had always 
been the profound longing for size. Year by year 
the longing increased until it became an accumulated 
force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We 
must be Bigger! Bigness means Money! And the 
thing began to happen; their longing became a 
mighty Will. We must be Bigger ! Bigger! Bigger! 
Get people here! Coax them here! Bribe them! 



196 Booth Tarlcington 

Swindle them into coming, if you must, but get 
them! Shout them into coming! Deafen them into 
coming! Any kind of people; all kinds of people! 
We must be Bigger! Blow! Boost! Brag! Kill 
the fault-finder! Scream and bellow to the Most 
High! Bigness is patriotism and honor! Bigness is 
love and life and happiness! Bigness is Money! 
We want Bigness ! 

They got it. From all the states the people came; 
thinly at first, and slowly, but faster and faster in 
thicker and thicker swarms as the quick years went 
by. White people came, and black people and 
brown people and yellow people; the negroes came 
from the South by the thousands and thousands, 
multiplying by other thousands faster than they 
could die. From the four quarters of the earth the 
people came, the broken and the unbroken, the 
tame and the wild — Germans, Irish, Italians, Hun- 
garians, Scotch, Welsh, Engh'sh, French, Swiss, 
Swedes, Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, Jews, 
Dalmatians, Armenians, Roumanians, Bulgarians, 
Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese, Chinese, 
Turks, and every hybrid that these could propagate. 
And if there were no Eskimos nor Patagonians, what 
other human strain that earth might furnish failed 
to swim and bubble in this crucible? 

The town had become a city. It scorned art, and 
it begot a very tolerable work of art, — The Turmoil. 
There used to be, about the time of Verlaine, a tribe 
of "un-moral" writers who called themselves, or were 
called, Symbolists, or Decadents, or something like 



Booth Tarhington 197 

that, and who found the evil and the ugly to be 
beautiful. They always went to great cities to look 
for their material. They had their cult, but they 
were not very popular. The metamorphosis of his 
town into a city had the same sort of an effect on Mr. 
Tarkington as an artist as his experience of the sor- 
didness of politics. In considering Mr. Tarkington's 
"insides" (as he terms the psychology of his char- 
acters) it will never do to get away from the fact 
that the things for which he most earnestly cares 
are the simple, honest, wholesome, upright things, 
and those which come of gentle breeding. Except 
his City of Turmoil, and fair bits of Paris in The 
Beautiful Lady and The Guest of Quesnay, he has 
never put a city into a novel. Though he has been 
much in New York, and, "purely on business," fre- 
quently goes there now, he declares that he knows 
"very little about even one bit of it"; and appar- 
ently he has never felt the special kind of romance 
of this "Bagdad of the subway." A friend of his, an 
Easterner (one of those who couldn't live anywhere 
West of the Hudson River), remarked of him, in an 
amused way, "He wouldn't live anywhere but in 
Indianapolis." He seems even to have a prejudice 
against New York, as in a letter to a friend he speaks 
of So-and-So's being "from" Kentucky, another 
man's being from Ohio, another from San Fran- 
cisco, a fourth he "suspects of having been born 



198 Booth Tarhington 

in or near New York," but in this case that "is all 
right." 

His special heaven on earth, apparently, is "the 
water" by his summer home in Maine. And his 
highly civilized soul, it would seem, answers deep 
unto deep with the "country." Calling on a friend 
who lived on the outskirts of Indianapolis, and, in 
a fancy overcoat, getting out of his limousine, he 
made as if to leap and shout. Asked why he made 
as if to leap and shout, he replied, "Why, this is 
regular country out here!" When it was mentioned 
that the weather had been bad in the country re- 
cently, he declared, "Any kind of weather is fine in 
the country." There is an art, such as O. Henry's, 
which finds something very humanly appealing in 
"grafters," pickpockets, and women of the town. 
Mr. Tarkington, I should say, is about as likely to 
write a story about a pickpocket as he is to be one. 
He would have all things clean, and simple, and 
"good." Thus, naturally, he was "riled" when in 
the former sweetness of that place: 

The old, leisurely, quizzical look of the faces was 
lost in something harder and warier; and a cockney 
type began to emerge discernibly — a cynical young 
mongrel, barbaric of feature, muscular and cunning; 
dressed in good fabrics, fashioned apparently in imi- 
tation of the sketches drawn by newspaper come- 
dians. The female of his kind came with him — a 




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Booth Tarkington 199 

pale girl, shoddy and a little rouged; and they com- 
municated in a nasal argot, mainly insolences and 
elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people 
showed change; in place of the old, midland vernacu- 
lar, irregular but clean, and not unwholesomely 
drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors began 
to be heard, held together by gunnas and gottas and 
much fostered by the public journals. 

The city piled itself high in the center, tower on 
tower for a nucleus, and spread itself out over the 
plain, mile after mile; and in its vitals, like benevo- 
lent bacilli contending with malevolent in the body 
of a man, missions and refugees offered what resist- 
ance they might to the saloons and all the hells that 
cities house and shelter. 

Singer, actor, poet, artist, preacher, psychologist, 
— and now sociologist, for such Mr. Tarkington 
definitely became in The Turmoil. "Of course I 
should claim that I am a, sociologist," he has said 
(somebody had suggested that he had not designed 
to be), "and I conceive it no particularly dashing 
claim either. If I were not one my novel could not 
be true. If a novelist is not a sociologist he is not a 
novelist, is he?" To the criticism that has been 
made in one or two places that in his rebellion 
against the god Bigness, against the lust for power, 
wealth, and magnitude which inflames this com- 
munity which may be taken as one typical of 
present-day America, and, he holds, has produced 



200 Booth Tarkington 

in its citizens a sort of spiritual, physical, and men- 
tal degeneration; that in this he has made the people 
of The Turmoil more selfish, arrogant, and mer- 
cenary than his models really are; that, in short, in 
his municipal and individual psychology he has over- 
stated his case; to this he retorts: "As a matter of 
fact, there isn't any answer to the criticism that 
The Turmoil overstates its case. There wouldn't be 
any answer if a doctor — merely diagnostician in this 
instance— said * Typhoid,' and a critic insisted, 'But 
you didn't notice what a pretty nose the patient 
has.'" Nor was he gratified at a kindly critic's 
urging in extenuation of the relentless and devastat- 
ing nature of his criticism that he promised that the 
patient would get well, that the city of which he 
writes, that America, in fact, is merely passing 
through a phase of growth; that the spiritual con- 
ditions described in The Turmoil cannot endure. 
"Either my diagnosis stands," he said shortly after 
the book was published, "or I have to eat it." Still, 
behind this something big, ugly, powerful, and "un- 
quenchably optimistic," Sheridan and his city, there 
must be something, some meaning. At any rate, an 
incorrigibly Bibbsian vision came to the beaten 
idealist, Bibbs, when, unaware that Love waited 
him just outside the door, he sat in his office and 
mused on his enemy, the conqueror, the city of his 
habitation: 



Booth Tarkington 201 

Looking once more from the window, Bibbs sculp- 
tured for himself — in the vague contortions of the 
smoke and fog above the roofs — a gigantic figure 
with feet pedestaled upon the great buildings and 
shoulders disappearing in the clouds, a colossus of 
steel and wholly blackened with soot. But Bibbs 
carried his fancy further — for there was still a little 
poet lingering at the back of his head — and he 
thought that up over the clouds, unseen from below, 
the giant labored with his hands in the clean sun- 
shine, and Bibbs had a glimpse of what he made 
there — perhaps for a fellowship of the children of 
the children that were children now — a noble and 
joyous city, unbelievably white. 

The Turmoil is all of a piece; it drives unswervingly 
to its appointed end. There is not a touch of clap- 
trap, of melodrama, of purple, in it. It has no essen- 
tial "situation," no point of "plot" at all, — as a re- 
viewer for a paper which is one of our first literary 
authorities said it had. Mr. Howells has declared 
(I have heard) that "no English writer on tiptoe 
could touch the climax of The Turmoil," But at what 
precise point of the book is there such an artifice as a 
"climax " ? There is no "shaping " at all in the effect 
of the story. It has grown, in effect, as naturally as a 
tree; and it has the swing, and rugged balance, and 
careless symmetry which (contrary to some artistic 
theories) Nature has. The career of Sheridan is por- 
trayed with the same sort of "composition" that ex- 



202 Booth Tarkington 

ists in life (was there not "composition" in the life 
of Napoleon ?) and no more. Behind The Turmoil 
everywhere is a remarkable, an amazing, pounding 
energy of mind. The vehemence of the satire curls 
the reader's hair. The evolution of the theme, so 
natural in effect, is positively devilish in its com- 
pleteness. The idea there elaborated is exhibited 
kicking with all its four legs in a manner that, one 
cannot resist saying, could not possibly be better. 
And the characters are no box of tricks, but people, 
everyone, hot off the bat, with uncommonly human 
"insides." And over all is a moving feeling of ap- 
preciation of what is fine and of compassion for what 
is absurd and pitiable. 

The elder Sheridan, of course, is the Silas Lamp- 
ham of his time, the typical self-made American of 
the era; and if he is not a "speaking likeness," I really 
don't know where you will go to hear one talking. 
Conrad's Swede, Axel Heyst, in Victory, has been 
called, most appropriately, "a South Sea Hamlet." 
Bibbs, I should call, an Indianapolis Hamlet. He 
has a Hamletic soul, this attractive young man, hu- 
morist, dreamer, sicklied o'er with thought. Mary 
Vertress's only fault is that she is so faultless; but 
she is not a pale nature. She has a will, this Diana 
Vernon with a bubbling sense of humor. As a crea- 
tion Mother Sheridan can only be described as a 
"peach." The elderly, pinched Mr. Vertrees, left 



Booth Tarkington £03 

at the post by the modern rush of things, "managing 
somehow" to maintain his "position in life," whose 
character is so beautifully reflected in the mirror of 
his "Landseers," is exquisitely rendered. The two 
elder brothers, Jim and Roscoe, "capable, hard- 
working young business men," wearing "young busi- 
ness men's moustaches" and "rich suitings in dark 
mixtures," are all over the land. Of the humorous, 
"racially sympathetic" George and Mist' Jackson 
nothing further is required to be said than that they 
are "colored." The figure of that "lamidaZ" Moor, 
it should be noted, plays not only a humorous part, 
but a scientific part, when crashed by Sheridan to 
give him relief at the culmination of his otherwise 
unbearable frenzy, — the same part as that played by 
Anatole France's wicker-work woman. 

The Turmoil is remarkable as a book of nervous 
diseases, all understood as if with the trained mind 
of the admirable Doc Gurney. Sheridan, of course, 
is a victim of the great American disease of money- 
mania. Bibbs is an invalid, whose malady, like 
Stevenson's, is of that peculiar order which seems to 
contribute to playful spirits and cheerfulness; and 
his cure is quite scientifically wrought. Roscoe is 
Mr. Tarkington's most thoroughly diagnosed case of 
alcoholism. He is not inherently a drunkard at all, 
has not the temperament, and would seem to be one 
only to the superficial judgment. He turns to drink 



£04 Booth Tarkington 

as the result of overwork and emotional strain, and, 
later, in his physical revulsion to "business," he pre- 
sents a very fair case of another great American 
disease, neuresthenia. The two vicious and un- 
scrupulous sisters-in-law are carefully studied ex- 
amples of a disease very prevalent, too, in this coun- 
try, feminine vulgarity. 

The Turmoil, further, is very interesting in its 
relation to the literature come out of Indiana. That 
literature up to the point of the appearance of this 
novel had been almost altogether that of the period 
when a people can't get away from boosting them- 
selves, of a young community with a chip on its 
shoulder. It was a colt fearful that its end would 
not be held up before the world. It had not the 
sophistication of the time when one can laugh and 
"cuss" at oneself. In short, The Turmoil marks a 
point of "culture" in the march of the literature of 
the State. 

Why is Mr. Tarkington so popular a writer? And 
why have some of his books, His Own People for one, 
fallen so far short of the immense popularity of 
others? As he sees it himself, popularity has always 
been an accident with him, and so has z/npopularity; 
both "just happened," so far, he says, as his own in- 
tentions have been concerned. He has had, there can 
be no doubt, the mechanical accomplishment at hand, 
always, to have written an unbroken series of popular 



Booth Tarhington 205 

books. In fact, he thinks (apparently quite hon- 
estly) that "anybody can write a popular story/' 
For Mr. Tarkington deliberately to have set him- 
self to produce an unbroken series of purely popular 
books, — nothing, one cannot fail to perceive in his 
talk, could have been more utterly impossible than 
his doing such a thing. 

It is difficult for one to get him to put his posi- 
tion in so many words, as, he says, it sounds like his 
saying that "he is a loyal American"; but driven into 
a corner he will confess his faith. And to view him 
with justice we ought to hear it. He has never, then, 
"played the goat to entertain anybody." If there 
are "devices" here and there in his books which 
have an air of being bids for popular favor, devices 
such as the far-fetched story part of The Flirt, they 
are there not because of a crafty motive of the au- 
thor's, but because he didn't know any better, — any 
other, better way of bringing out what he had in 
mind to bring out. That he put them in to please 
an editor or a book buyer: "Really, I'd as soon have 
forged a check." 

"I've written things only," he declares, "as I 
thought they ought to be written. I thought in my 
youth that life could be got into books with prettier 
colors and more shaping than the model actually 
had; and I fell in with a softer, more commonplace 
and more popular notion of what a story should be. 



206 Booth Tarkington 

Where that acceptance definitely stopped in me 
(though the book may not show it) was Beauty and 
the Jacobin. It was at that time that I was paint- 
ing with my old ornamental picture framer. Until 
then, I thought they were the 'cheese/ — not for 
sales, but the right 'cheese." 3 There is point, too, 
in noting that what now appear as very conven- 
tional features of some of Mr. Tarkington's early 
books, the "shaping" attempted in, for instance, 
The Gentleman from Indiana, were not so altogether 
conventional at the time those books were written. 
As a playwright Mr. Tarkington evidently does 
not take matters with such intense earnestness. 
That is "different"; the elaborate cost of the pro- 
duction is to be met; the "house" to be filled; "and 
then I'm not a playwright anyhow." But writing 
books is his "work." He is writing a book now that 
he doesn't think anybody will read. Doesn't see 
why anybody wanted to read The Turmoil. He got 
to "dislike those people so much" as he wrote about 
them that he does not see how "anybody can stand 
them." He glares about the room as he tells how 
much he got to "hate" "those people," as if he half 
feared that one of them might be coming back to see 
him. One has an idea that if, just then, the door 
bell should ring, Mr. Tarkington would nervously 
tell the maid not to let in any of those people of 
The Turmoil. 



Booth Tarkington 207 

But why is Mr. Tarkington so popular a writer? 
Because, it has repeatedly been asserted, he always 
has a "good story" to tell. But a study of the whole 
of his work certainly results in the conclusion that 
the "born story-teller" within him is the least of his 
talents, as of course it is the least valuable fellow 
in the heart of any artist. He doesn't care for 
"stories" at all, he says. Nothing, he declares, so 
bores him as to have someone outline a "story." 
However, let that go. Many people find in his 
books the enjoyment of a good story; and one should 
not quibble over what precisely a "story" is. A 
good story, after all, is a fabrication in which very 
real people seem to do very real things; and, in this 
sense, Seventeen is certainly a much better story than 
Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, At any rate, Mr. Tark- 
ington has a brilliant gift for the art of fiction, and, 
having thoroughly mastered the craft of writing, he 
tells what he has to tell most uncommonly well. The 
genuine intellectual vigor which has come into his 
work within recent years you may take with relish, or 
you may let it go whistling by, according to how 
you are "fixed" intellectually yourself. 

There is, however, a somewhat deeper explanation 
of the wide and general appeal which he makes. 
Someone (was it Mr. Howells?) has observed of 
Thackeray, that he was the ordinary British Philis- 
tine, plus genius. With that, as a judgment of 



208 Booth Tarhington 

Thackeray, we are not, of course, at the moment 
concerned; nor is an implication intended that Mr. 
Tarkington is a regular Philistine. There is, how- 
ever, this thing about him: he is very much like most 
people. There is nothing, except its energy, peculiar 
about his mind; it has no strong idiosyncratic bias, 
no strange, abnormal quality. At first, as in Cherry, 
he may have been excessively belletristic. That was 
not only not odd, but quite natural in a well edu- 
cated, young writer. But, just for the joke of the 
thing, think, for an instant of Mr. Tarkington in 
connection with such a writer as, let us say, George 
Moore. In this wearer of the literary ermine you 
find laid bare a soul compacted of nearly everything 
that is detestable to the mind of a plain citizen 
going about his business in the marketplace. He has 
confessed consuming egotism, quivering sensibility, 
fastidiousness, vanity, timidity coupled with cal- 
culating shamelessness, sensuality, a streak of feline 
cruelty, and absolute spiritual incontinence. Or try 
to think of Mr. Tarkington coming along with some 
such perverse thinking (however shrewd) as Samuel 
Butler's: "the worst misfortune that can happen to 
any person is to lose his money; the second is to 
lose his health; and the loss of reputation is a bad 
third." Mr. Tarkington admires all those things 
which every decent, ordinary, simple-hearted person 
admires: dash, courage, honesty, honor, feminine 



Booth Tarkington 209 

virtue and graciousness and beauty, and so on. He 
hates precisely those things hated by all honest, 
healthy, "American" people: sham, egoism, conceit, 
cruelty, affectation, and so forth. In short, though 
he is a red hot artist (and most Americans "don't 
care a nickel for art"), he believes in all those things 
which make up the creed of the average sane, whole- 
some person in this country. He has infectious 
humor, and (though savage in attack upon what he 
feels to be vicious) abounding "good humor." Added 
to all this, he has a most winning and rich, though 
not at all complex, personality. He is in his own 
person, indeed, what most of us would like to be. 
In a word, doubtless his books are popular because 
of the same qualities that made their author popular 
as an undergraduate. 

While Mr. Tarkington's appearance in the maga- 
zines is not confined to those of "popular" price, he 
does appear in these so consistently that, in the case 
of a writer who could go anywhere, there must be 
some point to this. I don't know that he has ever, 
since his John-a-Dreams days, been in a magazine 
addressed exclusively to the "judicious" and the 
"discerning," a magazine of the type which must 
depend for its existence upon the interest of the 
comparatively small class of "cultivated" readers. 
There is, at least, an implication in this fact that 
he has a relish for not appearing there. His prefer- 



210 Booth Tarkington 

ence, as a stage for himself, for the magazine frankly 
addressed to the heart of the whole lot of us is so 
marked that there can be little doubt that he holds 
it the greater triumph to be in spirit cheek by jowl 
with the multitude. Indeed, he has expressed some 
such creed in his appreciation of Riley, "the people's 
poet," published in Collier's Weekly shortly after the 
poet's death: "The laurel is bestowed by the people. 
Not even the king can make a laureate; the laurel 
is always bestowed by the people. Afterward the 
universities hear of what has happened and protect 
the wreath." You may hold (as I do) that it is the 
other way round: that it is the passionate few who 
make such a fuss about literature, because to them 
it is a thing that really matters, who create and main- 
tain real literary reputation. However, that's not 
Mr. Tarkington's view. 

The term "cultivated reader," and all its kin, 
one picks up very quickly in his presence, rubs him 
the wrong way. His little short of violent reaction to 
the whole idea of the "literary" atmosphere is a 
subject for, with apologies for the offensive word, 
the literary alienist. His friends know that at 
public dinners he always "winches," as he puts it, 
at every oratorical reference to "literature." A 
general aversion to anything savoring of what is 
popularly regarded as the literary taint is, of course, 
a conspicuous mark of the day of which Mr. Tark- 



Booth Tarkington £11 

ington is so thoroughly a part. Our magazines of 
considerable literary traditions announce "unlit- 
erary" essays. But his own antipathy to the un- 
fortunate, great popular taboo has unusual personal 
earmarks. 

We have a bromidiom rampant among us about 
the author who is interested in Life rather than in 
literature. But we should have ample evidence in 
the striking range of Mr. Tarkington's literary allu- 
sion in his work, if we had no other way of knowing it, 
that he is sufficiently interested in literature to main- 
tain an acquaintance, a sort of easy camaraderie, with 
the best that has been thought and done in the 
world. — Though these allusions, so frequent as to 
constitute a habit, are singularly unobtrusive, have 
a colloquial air, indeed, and invariably are so pat 
that if any of them were to be removed the omission 
would perceptibly weaken the woof of the exposition. 
In conversation, a person of pronounced literary in- 
terests would find it hard to take him on a tack 
where he was not at home; would, indeed, find very 
stimulating his alertness to all sorts of literary ideas 
and his active scrutiny of the claims of all sorts of 
literary tendencies, both past and current. He can 
"talk shop" to make your head spin; but it would 
be a considerable feat of the imagination to picture 
him as ever "aestheticising," in George Moore's 
word. 



212 Booth Tarkington 

Mr. Tarkington's swarming literary opinions — or 
perhaps one had better say opinions of writers and 
on writing — strike one attempting to "size him up" 
as having abundant critical acuteness, and in expres- 
sion are couched in phrases of a technical smack. He 
always "feels the ink," for instance, in the work of 
Alfred Noyes. There is, too, illuminating self -reve- 
lation in this observation, as, one perceives, keeping 
the "ink" out of it is precisely one of Mr. Tarking- 
ton's great aims in his work at present: an endeavor 
to present a transcript of life directly from the field, 
so to say, and not by way of the study. The impell- 
ing purpose of his maturity, one feels, is to be the 
antithesis of the editorial writer, Farwell Knowles, 
who was taught something of practical politics by 
Boss Gorgett in In the Arena, and to not "see things 
along book lines." Further, Mr. Howells, in his 
opinion, is the one genuinely American realist; Nor- 
ris and Dreiser are Zola and Russian. And this 
pronouncement is decidedly suggestive, too, as "along 
of it" it occurs to one that one of the outstanding 
features of Mr. Tarkington's career is that he has 
never lurked in the purlieus of "schools," never in- 
sinuated himself into "movements." 

One of the characteristic phases of our day is that 
many successful writers "go in for" offices in sky- 
scrapers. The air of their modernity and practical- 
ity is further heightened by their preference for bank 



Booth Tarhington 213 

buildings in which to do their work. I know one 
who has the imperial suite, so to say, in the Harri- 
man Bank Building; and Mr. Nicholson's "office 
hours" are spent in a bank building on his Washing- 
ton Street. Though the principle which animates 
Mr. Tarkington's work certainly is distinctly incom- 
patible with the Sir-Leslie-Stephen-flom^-ift-a-Zvi- 
brary kind of thing, we find him at work in an 
apartment which is a combination of library and 
art museum. The walls of the commodious, second 
floor, front room in the old-fashioned house in In- 
dianapolis, which is his work-room, are lined with 
books to the number, certainly, of several thousand. 
Above the shelves the walls continue to be effaced 
by a swarming mass of paintings (including many 
portraits of himself familiar to one's memory), un- 
usual drawings, and handsome reproductions of 
works, like Whistler's "Miss Alexander," familiar 
to any amateur of art. Down stairs the Stanford- 
White-Old-Curiosity-Shop effect reaches out through 
the dining room, and for all I know extends into the 
kitchen; the weird jumble being topped by a frieze 
of aged Italian canvases, both good and mediocre, 
and apparently all equally cherished by the possessor, 
who will dilate to the visitor over a fine thing or, with 
equal relish of its interest to himself, over a thing 
simply boring to the visitor. 
Though Mr. Tarkington has got together a re- 



214 Booth Tarkington 

markable lot of objects of (more or less) art, he 
could not be called a "collector" in any strict sense 
of the word, that is, one who assembles works of 
art in accordance with some logical system. He has 
bought, evidently, whatever has appealed to this or 
that interest in him: a painting by a local painter, 
or a Roman fountain. And should he take a fancy 
to such a thing (which, one feels, is not altogether 
unlikely) he might, you have an idea, buy a brass 
monkey. Lining, or rather plastering, the hall, the 
paintings continue; and, with no diminishing in the 
effect of remarkable abundance, they mount the 
ascent of the stairway: Metcalf, Robert Reid, good- 
ness knows who all are there. A sense of the fact that 
he has overwhelmingly cluttered up his house with 
riches rather than decorated it has apparently struck 
the owner, as he announces to the visitor that he is 
now building a house in Maine which will have 
"nothing in it, nothing at all." 

The picture — not the painted one, but the real 
one — of Mr. Tarkington in his habit as he labors is 
startlingly unlike anything ever done of him in 
paint or print. He is collarless (the collar-button of 
his shirt unbuttoned), and garbed in an old and par- 
ticularly evil-looking dressing-gown, which looks as 
if it might have been constructed of a horse-blanket 
which had seen active service, and had not been 
renovated since. This blanket accentuates the 



Booth Tarkington 215 

rounded stoop which he seems to take on in this 
chamber, a stoop so marked as to give him at mo- 
ments a hunchback appearance. Removed from the 
handsome, and youthful, lines of his tailored clothes, 
with this prehistoric stoop, and in this quaint gunny- 
sack gown, he presents, now and then, altogether a 
humorously elderly effect. No, not elderly; old, 
very old; ancient — beyond the reckoning of years. 
Especially is this so when he puts on (with a trem- 
bling hand) his shell spectacles, to peer at something. 
And podders about the room in shuffling slippers, as 
he does in a kind of lean-slippered-and pantaloon 
manner. All in all, the visitor who has the privileged 
honor to penetrate into the upper fastness is likely 
to receive an impression of the master of the house 
as a bizarre object. Your host has the general effect 
of recalling to your mind some figure in a wild tale. 
An eccentric being, an old uncle, a miser, maybe, 
in a Stevenson yarn of romance. In poetic justice, 
a black cat should perch upon the shoulder of this 
figure; this ancient should keep his teeth in a glass; 
he should, midst squeaking wheezes and rusty cackles, 
poke the fire with a broken bellows. 

To the imagination, in the setting here of his rich 
library, this picturesque gentleman might be, the 
last thing in the world he is, a "man of books," a 
bibliophile. Though a bibliophile, a man who makes 
of book collecting an exact science, did one scrutinize 



216 Booth Tarhington 

these shelves, would be very much annoyed; he 
would find the library as miscellaneous and demo- 
cratic as the museum: the aesthete, Arthur Symons, 
shoulders the soldier of fortune, Richard Harding 
Davis. Close by one window is a sharply tilted 
drawing table, on the face of which rest a number 
of sheets of manila legal cap, the top sheet inscribed 
in a huge hand, "Chap. V." And on a stand by the 
table is a startling array of dozens and dozens of long, 
newly -sharpened pencils. "Sharpen 'em all the night 
before," explains Mr. Tarkington. Stern prepara- 
tion for the coming death-grapple with that angel! 

In England it is a common thing for an author to 
be a game-warden, a constable, or a squire, or some 
such thing. Mr. Tarkington is not exactly any of 
these things in his own "shire," but he does fill the 
chair of a public spirited citizen of his city. He 
serves on sundry committees and lends his name to 
the support of divers charities. A point more to our 
purpose here, however, is that in times of public 
crisis he becomes something of a publicist, and may 
be seen now and then hurrying along the street on 
his way to the newspaper office with an article in his 
hand to be presented for publication. This article 
usually is "set" in bold faced type in a "box" on 
the front page next day, — and makes very mediocre 
reading. 

Now and then Mr. Tarkington has taken little 



Booth Tarkington 217 

spins in the field of the essayist. He has been be- 
trayed into an article on the manners of the Middle 
West, a few travel sketches, a (very "wordy") 
"critical introduction" to a translation of Victor 
Cherbuliez's Samuel Brohl et Cie., at least once into 
a bit of "art criticism," and into other such "occa- 
sional" writings, most recently his article on drink, 
"Nipskillions." These, happily infrequent, per- 
formances are curiously interesting, in the same way 
that it is interesting and puzzling to observe that a 
man totally without fear in battle may be a man 
fearful of being left alone at night, or shrink from 
looking out of the top window of a skyscraper. 
Not only is Mr. Tarkington quite devoid of the 
journalist's "touch," but all inspiration appears 
mysteriously to desert him entirely the moment he 
turns from purely creative writing. And the effect, 
in most cases, of his "articles" mainly is to recall to 
the reader's mind the epigrammatic observation 
upon another writer that he "had no talent what- 
ever, — only genius." It could never be said that 
Mr. Tarkington "disported" himself as a journalist. 
As a "miscellaneous writer" he is altogether too 
(in Mr. Herford's phrase) "intensely intense." The 
thing which seems to be the matter with his "jour- 
nalism" is the thing which is giving him more and 
more force as an artist, his high seriousness. When 
he writes an article a monster of earnestness within 



218 Booth Tarkington 

him seems to rise up and take him by the throat 
with (to a bit confuse the figure) rather deadening 
effect on the reader. 

What is to come we know not. But we know 
That what has been was good — good to show, — 

The author of The Gentleman from Indiana was a 
neophyte of rich promise. He has, after some wav- 
erings, more than amply fulfilled that early promise. 
He has learned his trade in all its departments. He 
has employed in practice as an artistic precept the 
moral one, to try all things and then to hold fast to 
that which is good. He has found his true, rare 
vocation, that of satirist, critic. He is in the prime 
of life, what is called "the very plenitude of his 
powers." He has entered upon a period of amazing 
productivity; is very much "on the job"; and ap- 
pears to be "functioning" perfectly. He has gath- 
ered himself together, and set his house in order. 
He has been chastened by life, and success. He 
holds in the hollow of his hand the magic of style. 
He knows men (women and boys), books and cities. 
What sort of critical speculation may be hazarded 
as to what degree of excellence he may reasonably 
be expected yet to attain? By what he has done he 
has "let himself in for" a good deal to come. By 
what he has now written we may know that he has 
not yet begun to write. 

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